I was just looking to show a friend at work programming for kids on the Raspberry Pi, away from my usual Smalltalk activities at home, and was surprised to find an article mentioning Scratch with GPIO and our very own Tim & Eliot, which I thought I'd share
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-new-version-of-scratch-for-raspberry-pi-n...
cheers -ben
It's when I finished I guesss, off I go trusting the hoohah to get us there. The Pi, I can't wait to start.
On 12/16/2015 10:31 PM, Ben Coman wrote:
I was just looking to show a friend at work programming for kids on the Raspberry Pi, away from my usual Smalltalk activities at home, and was surprised to find an article mentioning Scratch with GPIO and our very own Tim & Eliot, which I thought I'd share
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-new-version-of-scratch-for-raspberry-pi-n...
cheers -ben
On 16-12-2015, at 7:31 PM, Ben Coman btc@openInWorld.com wrote:
I was just looking to show a friend at work programming for kids on the Raspberry Pi, away from my usual Smalltalk activities at home, and was surprised to find an article mentioning Scratch with GPIO and our very own Tim & Eliot, which I thought I'd share
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-new-version-of-scratch-for-raspberry-pi-n...
It’s been fun for the last couple of years to be full-time working on something unequivocally good, rather than merely profitable. A couple of million kids apparently use it every week at school and home. We started off with a really slow system that got people interested but annoyed them after a short while of trying to cope with grindingly slow response; after some reworking of a fair bit of really bad code it got fast enough to keep kids interested. Then after rewriting a lot more, it was able to run on the newer VMs, which made it a bit faster still. Then Eliot & I worked on the Cog and got a bit faster still. The Pi2 came out, which also helped.
All in all, for a big Scratch project we chose as a bellwether, we went from less than 1fps of PacMan to better than 30. And it still costs just US$35. Or indeed, US$5 for the new Pi Zero, which whilst a mere single-core ARMv6 is still ~40% faster than the original hardware and so a decent Scratch-box. For FIVE DOLLARS! 40 Dorado for FIVE DOLLARS!
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful random insult:- In serious need of attitude adjustment.
Tim,
Is the default virtual machine shipped with scratch the Cog-ARM version or the stack interpreter ? Is it a spur or non spur VM ?
I know you made it work but I wonder if it's in production or not.
2015-12-17 5:52 GMT+01:00 tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org:
On 16-12-2015, at 7:31 PM, Ben Coman btc@openInWorld.com wrote:
I was just looking to show a friend at work programming for kids on the Raspberry Pi, away from my usual Smalltalk activities at home, and was surprised to find an article mentioning Scratch with GPIO and our very own Tim & Eliot, which I thought I'd share
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-new-version-of-scratch-for-raspberry-pi-n...
It’s been fun for the last couple of years to be full-time working on something unequivocally good, rather than merely profitable. A couple of million kids apparently use it every week at school and home. We started off with a really slow system that got people interested but annoyed them after a short while of trying to cope with grindingly slow response; after some reworking of a fair bit of really bad code it got fast enough to keep kids interested. Then after rewriting a lot more, it was able to run on the newer VMs, which made it a bit faster still. Then Eliot & I worked on the Cog and got a bit faster still. The Pi2 came out, which also helped.
All in all, for a big Scratch project we chose as a bellwether, we went from less than 1fps of PacMan to better than 30. And it still costs just US$35. Or indeed, US$5 for the new Pi Zero, which whilst a mere single-core ARMv6 is still ~40% faster than the original hardware and so a decent Scratch-box. For FIVE DOLLARS! 40 Dorado for FIVE DOLLARS!
tim
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful random insult:- In serious need of attitude adjustment.
On 17-12-2015, at 12:27 AM, Clément Bera bera.clement@gmail.com wrote:
Tim,
Is the default virtual machine shipped with scratch the Cog-ARM version or the stack interpreter ? Is it a spur or non spur VM ?
I know you made it work but I wonder if it's in production or not.
It’s in production use on all those millions of Pis. ‘it’ being a Cog spur vm, currently a 5.0-3484 version. A simplistic performance chart -
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
vm-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Ben Coman -
Clément Bera -
Robert Withers -
tim Rowledge