A brief concern about scratch on the pi

 

This morning on twitter a tweet is doing the rounds announcing that there is now a version of scratch that supports the Minecraft api.

It's great that there is now a version that now allows programming of Minecraft using the api on the Raspberry Pi (Get here).

However what concerns me is that there are to my counting now three versions of scratch on the Raspberry Pi. The basic original flavour, a version that supports the GPIO, and joining them the Minecraft version. So depending on what a teacher wants to do on the Raspberry Pi they have to make sure they have installed and selected the correct version to use. Let alone how confusing for students.

I hate this sort of splintering, and to stop confusion, and to make sure the versions keep in step with each other (Bug fixes, features etc), these projects need to co-ordinate and merge into a single release for the Raspberry Pi.

It's fantastic that people out there care enough to do this, but please care enough to make things easy for students, teachers, and users in general too.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Minecraft on Pi Controlling A Robot Arm

So basically my student using the python api for Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi has coded it so that when you hit a block it controls part of the USB robotic arm.
I'll put the code up later as an update to this post.

UPDATE 1: This setup will be on show Monday 24th at our Open Evening as well for those that would like to see it in real life.
UPDATE 2: Here is a link to the Python code that was written by my student that does all the stuff you see in the video. It should link to a shared directory on Google Drive (let me know if there are any problems).
UPDATE 3: Here is a link to the java code for the status updater that was developed and shown by my student at the STEM Fair yesterday.