[squeak-dev] [ANN] UziScript first pre-release!
David T. Lewis
lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Jan 24 02:40:55 UTC 2019
Richo,
Thank you for posting this. I watched the youtube playlist, and it
gives a good overview of how UziScript is used.
I hope to hear more about this project in the future, especially as
it is used by teachers and students.
Thanks!
Dave
On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 01:10:34PM -0300, Ricardo Moran wrote:
> 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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