Project talk:Classroom HackSpaceChallenge

Ideas

• Do you mean lego? I think something between Lego mindstorms and PICAXE/Arduino, as I know at my school (and the Young hackspace kids) love to get the mindstorms out - but the PICAXE programming overwhelms them slightly (maybe due to bad teaching?), so school doesn't use them a lot. Maybe making it inter-operable with lego pieces? I know there is a guy at the hackspace trying to reverse engineer them, and the modular-ness is great. (MonkeyJam)

• I meant logo, kids today :P. Modularness would be cool. If we had a working makerbot we could make bricks that are lego compatible(maybe not the hackspaces?). Or could we do something with the laser cutter, hmm.

• The makerbot would seem the obvious way - but we wouldn't need to make many pieces as schools may already have lego - I was just thinking making a different sort of 'brain', where they can learn more about EE, (making it better than NXC) as well as a kid friendly language. So there is more guidance than with arduino, but its more open than Lego, and is hackable if you know what you are doing.

Programmable Bricks

What about ... bricks which allow you to create programs? So, for example, a brick which does an "if" statement, with an input and two outputs (for true and false), an input for the condition (so, a sensor reading brick perhaps). Something like LabVIEW except physical objects instead of theoretical ones. You could have the contacts be magnetically attached. You could have power coming from a "start" brick, perhaps with a LiPo battery? And give it a USB interface for both charging and manipulating it via a computer if you have one available.

You'd design the interconnects such that it's impossible to plug them in wrong (for obvious reasons).

This would give people the chance to use mechanical design techniques (maybe build prototypes with makerbot/laser cutter), electronics (custom PCBs), as well as some fairly hardcore programming which would puzzle people for hours.

Very Similar idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRTsk7SAKMs

Except we'd want something a bit more rugged and portable