Control an NXT from a Scratch-like Environment

[clintonb]

Greetings.

Scratch is an introductory programming language targeted at kids, in which they can drag and drop code tiles to form their programs. I recently learned that Scratch will communicate to other programs over a network socket via a simple protocol, and wrote a program to stand between an extended variation of Scratch and the NXT to allow you to control the NXT from that simple environment. My write-up on the results is here.

My goal is to go further than that -- I'd really like to make it so that kids can code something up in a Scratch-like environment, control and debug the robot in real-time (possibly even using the standard NXT firmware), and export the code to something they can compile and run on the robot autonomously. I'd certainly be interested in any feedback on the idea!

[esmetaman]

Pretty interesting post. I will test.

Cheers

[clintonb]

I'm glad to hear that, esmetaman.

Do you mean to say that you'll try out the code I've posted, or that you are interested in testing Enchanting when I have something ready for testing?

[xpansive]

Interesting idea - I haven't used Scratch, but I've heard its very good for people learning to program.

[esmetaman]

Hi,

I will test the platform and I suppose that I will post some example to show my results

In secondary school Scratch is fantastic to teach how to develop programs.