Announcing Enchanting

[Clinton B]

Greetings.

I've been working on a program to enable people to more easily program their LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots, called Enchanting. It is somewhat similar to NXT-G, but is based on Scratch, a popular programming environment for children. A nine-minute demonstration video is on the site, and version 0.0.4 is available for download (but requires LeJOS NXJ to be installed and working).

Cheers,

Clinton B

[DLuders]

Welcome to Eurobricks, ClintonWBlackmore! Your

is quite intriguing:

"This video shows off Enchanting version 0.0.4, which can be used to program LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots in a Scratch-like environment."

"What Is Enchanting? -- Enchanting is an open-source graphical programming environment for children to program their LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots(and, in the future, possibly other devices.) Enchanting is based on Scratch from the MIT Media Laboratory. Scratch is an excellent tool for empowering children to program, and familiarity with it will be very valuable for anyone using Enchanting. See the Vision For Enchanting."

[dolittle]

Hi,

Very nice project, was is the target age?

I think 10-12 years old won't like it so much as it is too story like and less "programing". Yes kids love to think/believe they are programming the robot.

I think that the target age of 6-8 would be best, as at that age they love to make up stories, and your program looks like the perfect way for them to tell the robot "a story".

Thanks,

Noam

[Clinton B]

Hi,

Very nice project, was is the target age?

I think 10-12 years old won't like it so much as it is too story like and less "programing". Yes kids love to think/believe they are programming the robot.

I think that the target age of 6-8 would be best, as at that age they love to make up stories, and your program looks like the perfect way for them to tell the robot "a story".

Thanks,

Noam

Thank you, DLuders.

dolittle,

I think the program will be the perfect way to tell a story -- or to make a fully functional autonomous robot, in some cases, using finite state machines or behaviour-based systems for control.

As Scratch is aimed at children as young as eight, it'd be difficult for me to aim for a younger group with a harder-to-use program : ) I hope it'll be useful to people as young as nine or ten, and useful to adults as well.

I'm thrilled to hear you think it might be useful to ones to young -- it indicates I'm on the right track!

Cheers,

Clinton