At IDC 2012 in June, Arnan Sipitakiat and Nusarin Nusen discussed how they are using Robo-Blocks-a turtle robot and “tangible Turtle Blocks”-to teach problem solving and debugging skills to 5- through 12-year-olds.

One of the things I learned from their presentation was that children had difficulty reasoning about relative angles. The Robo-Blocks ( Read more... )

Here's a first look at an XOrduino Turtle bot driving around:

I've checked out all of the functionality on the A1.5 board except the step-up voltage regulator now. I'm optimistic the B1 boards (being made now in Taipei) will be clean.

It will be great when we've got lesson plans written up so kids can learn how to control the bot with Turtle ( Read more... )

Here's a quick look at the next versions of the XOrduino and XO Stick boards. These were assembled from a small quantity of "pre-B1" boards I had made at BatchPCB.

I've uploaded some more pictures to the XOrduino album as well.

Here's a little table relating the board versions pictured with those I've previously discussed.
BuildXOrduinoXO ( Read more... )

Free things first: I've got parts for 20 copies of the "Mk I" XOrduino and XO Stick. I'm mailing them out for free (!) in exchange for your development help. Send me an email at xorduino@gmail.com describing what you'd like to do with the XOrduino/XO Stick, and your full mailing address. Best 20 or so get kits.


( Read more... )

I banged out two open hardware designs this week, designed for use with the OLPC XO laptops.

The first is the XOrduino, a stripped down low-cost Arduino-compatible board that plugs right into the XO's USB ports. But wait, there's more: it's also compatible with the Scratch Sensor Board, so you can use this device to control Scratch (and Turtle Art ( Read more... )