Arduino Gives Its Alvik Educational Robot mBlock Visual Coding Powers
If your learners are a little too young for MicroPython, mBlock is now an option for programming the educational Arduino Alvik robot.
Arduino's Alvik educational robot platform has learned a new language — with an update delivering block-based visual coding for younger or beginning learners, plus support for Google ChromeOS devices including Chromebooks.
"At Arduino, we believe coding should be accessible to everyone – including the youngest learners," the Arduino team writes of the new release. "With this in mind, we’re thrilled to announce that the Arduino Alvik robot now officially supports block-based coding! With mBlock’s intuitive block-based coding and Alvik as a tangible, interactive robot companion, elementary students and teachers can explore robotics, mathematics, astronomy, and other engaging projects."
The Arduino Alvik was unveiled back at the start of the year, and taken through its paces in our recent hands-on review. A two-wheeled robot chassis driven by a pair of microcontrollers, Alvik aims to make learning robotics as easy as possible — abstracting away a lot of the complexities by running the actual robotics code on one microcontroller and having user code run on another, communicating with the first via an accessible application programming interface (API).
New support in Makeblock's mBlock visual coding environment dramatically expands the applicability of the Alvik platform to even younger learners, providing a way to customize its operation without having to write MicroPython code by hand. In support, Arduino has also launched a hands-on course providing the same step-by-step project-focused approach as its previous materials for MicroPython.
The new support for mBlock brings an additional feature, too: compatibility with tablets and laptops running Google's ChromeOS, which can now use mBlock's in-browser web app interface to create new programs and flash them directly to Alvik's user-facing microcontroller. The software is also supported on Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows, and should be usable under Linux and other operating systems that have WebSerial-supporting browsers available.
The Alvik mBlock course is available on Arduino's site, free for signed-in users; Alvik support is now live in mBlock, though in beta form.
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.