Hi everybody,

We are very pleased to announce the first pre-release of UziScript (
https://github.com/GIRA/UziScript), a new programming environment for
educational robotics.

For a long time we've been wanting to show you what we are working on at
GIRA (http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/) and although we're still far from
finished we've decided it's time to share our little project with the
community.

As some of you may know we work mostly on developing tools to facilitate
the use of robots for education. We published Physical Etoys as part of
that work. Now we are working on a new programming environment that
attempts to fix some common problems we see in most of the tools available
for educational robotics.
We call this environment UziScript and it consists of a small VM that runs
on an Arduino, a web server that runs on your computer, and a set of web
tools that use the web server to connect and program the Arduino. We're
focusing on Arduino UNO for now (mainly because it's very popular and
accessible) but we plan to support other boards in the future.

UziScript has a few cool features:

   - *Block-based and text-based programming*: It includes a block-based
   programming language suitable for beginners but it also supports text-based
   programming for more advanced users. To ease the transition UziScript
   automatically generates the textual code from the blocks (and viceversa).
   - *Concurrency*: Most educational robotics projects require the
   implementation of a device that performs two or more simultaneous tasks.
   UziScript allows the definition of concurrent tasks that will be executed
   independently from each other.
   - *Autonomy*: UziScript programs are stored and executed autonomously in
   the Arduino without requiring a connection to the computer.
   - *Interactive programming*: If the board is connected to the computer
   UziScript allows to inspect and monitor the program state while it runs.
   Furthermore, every change made to the program can be automatically compiled
   and transmitted to the Arduino, which allows to see the effects of the
   change almost immediately.
   - *Debugging*: Without debugging tools the process of fixing programming
   errors can be frustrating for an inexperienced user. UziScript's debugger
   provides mechanisms for error handling and step-by-step code execution.

All the code is open source and can be found on Github:
https://github.com/GIRA/UziScript. We also made a few short videos to show
UziScript in action:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1aXD47455XPWv4rTXQBuHvamCoNUGeke

We're still not ready to use this with actual teachers and students (we
have a LOT of bugs and unfinished features) but we think we're ready to
show this to other programmers.
You can download and try our first pre-release  (
https://github.com/GIRA/UziScript/releases/tag/v0.1.1). We would greatly
appreciate any comments or suggestions.

Have fun!
Richo
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