Minibloq: Graphical programming environment for Arduino

Development Boards Arduino
15

Hi Shimniok, thanks for your comments!

First, sorry for my English, I speak Spanish natively.

Teaching robotics to kids: big thing! I worked both with kids and with adults (mainly beginners). We used different equipment, but now we work near everything with Arduino-compatible controllers.

But with small kids, we had some problems with text based programming and C/C++ syntax. So we started Minibloq as a side project at first, and now want (need) to finish it as fast as possible to start using it in the courses and, as it’s open and free, to help others to use non-propietary tools for teaching. I personally worked (and works today) in the details that should make the user’s life simpler. For example, Minibloq shows the errors in real time, in red color, and you can always see the generated code side to side with the blocks. More: The code flows vertically (in some other tools, it’s horizontal), so the text based code is very similar to the blocks code. This is important specially for those kids that will start using text based programming, after they has learned the basics with the graphical tool.

Minibloq will have some extra features, that we think are very important (some of them are already implemented, others not yet):

  • - Some tools (even propietary, paid ones) lack zoom (incredibly, isnt't it?). So it's not possible to visualize the whole program when it grows. Minibloq has.
  • - Minibloq was designed to run and to be confortable, even in netbooks. This is important. We started using laptops in the courses, but when the space is small (and that was our case), you need all the possible space to build and test the robots. So netbooks are better in these cases, and of course, cheaper. With Minibloq, You can do most actions both with the mouse or with the keyboard.
  • - It's standalone. Some places lack a good Internet connection. Minibloq can run even from a flash drive, because it is installation free (except for the hardware drivers).
  • - One very important thing is that Minibloq only shows to the user the blocks that can be used in the current context. So the user is not annoyed looking the block he wants between a lot of them. For example: when you want to add a numeric param, you only see the numeric picker.

    • There are more things, so we can continue talking about it.

    Regards!

    Julián

    Minibloq’s Kickstarter page is http://kck.st/mnWW8y). Thanks!