Blockly for Dash & Dot robots ported to tablets

[Orion Elenzil]

Hey All!

Just thought folks here might like to hear about a project we've been working on at Wonder Workshop - a version of Blockly which runs on tablets and connects via bluetooth to our robots Dash & Dot, made to help kids learn to code!  We've built custom blocks to allow kids to easily create interactive programs for everything from simple color and sound sequences to complex maze-solving (in the real world). One robot can also interact with another and trigger events using the accelerometer.

Under the hood, the Blockly app is linked to our native UI for robot connection management (this UI is shared across all our apps) as well as to our native API for interacting with the robots. In order to respond in real-time to the sensors coming back from the robot, we make use of another of Neil's projects, the Javascript Interpreter. This was critical to deal with the real-time nature of a physical robot.

Currently we've released the app on the iOS app store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blockly-for-dash-dot-robots/id906750147?mt=8) and in the Google Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.makewonder.blockly). The current version is an intuitive, beginner level way of interacting with Blockly and robots. In the coming months, we are releasing new ways to learn how to use more advanced blocks, variables, expressions, functions, and more.

You can check out how kids are using the Blockly app to solve mazes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGIMKjKszXM and even how adults are using it to run a cookies and milk dispensing machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PL-SAD1n98

We'd like to give a huge thank you to Neil for his assistance getting this going and of course for the technology! We’d love for you to give it a try and let us know what you think!

cheers,

the Wonder Workshop dev-team.