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):
There are more things, so we can continue talking about it.
Regards!
Julián
Minibloq’s Kickstarter page is http://kck.st/mnWW8y). Thanks!