oldmanegan
Member
Hi guys,
Seeing that you are nearby the MIT guys that started up Modkit, possibly you've had a chance to work with them. Their concept seems like it may be a facilitator for your product, although I will purchase without the added ease of Modkit.
http://www.modk.it/
I look forward to hearing back on this.
John
TcLeaf
Member
The graphics look good, but I'm not clear on the intent of the drag and drop. It looks like most of the effort went into making that, but how would you do something like create a bit-bang I2C port, keep it as a function, and use that function in other code to send/receive/parse messages? If the answer is: "that too complex", then it seems like a whole lot of effort would have gone into very limited things. I have not used a drag and drop coder before, so I might be missing something. Also, if you switch to code view, make changes, then switch back to graphics view, does the graphics view get updated correctly?
gbulmer
Moderator
Modk.it is 'inspired' by http://scratch.mit.edu/, Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is Open Source, runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and if you want to experiment with it on a PC, can be downloaded now, for free. Scratch is written in SmallTalk, and runs on the portable SmallTalk 'squeak' VM (which is itself written in C).
AFAIK, Modkit is the work of an individual.
I've been working with a friend who teaches teachers and primary school children Scratch for several years. The children are 7-10 years old, and get to grips with programming using Scratch in minutes. Scratch removes all the problems of learning syntax, which typically distract new programmers for the first dozen hours.
Scratch is not aimed at replacing C/C++. It is superb at enabling someone who has never programmed to program.
IMHO, the huge advantage of Scratch over flow-chart based graphical programming systems is Scratch does not damage people's understanding of programming. Scratch blocks are direct cognates for real, modern, programming language constructs; in Scratch an "if ... else ..." is a single block, not some 'accidental' combination of flow-chart boxes and lines.
I have been working with a large UK University to develop a physical computing board so that people who use an extended version of Scratch can program using real-time sensors, motors, servo's etc. This system is capable of being used for a much wider range of problems than Scratch.
It is not clear if Modk.it will be Open Source
StephenFromNYC
Moderator
Hello,
I found this link on the Lifelong Kindergarten web site:
http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=2748
It suggests an official "Scratch for Arduino" project is being developed at MIT. If this is true then I guess it will be open source.
I do not know if there is any collaboration with the modk.it project.
Stephen from NYC
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