Lego Robotics For The Rest Of Us

KMi’s Peter Whalley and Ben Hawkridge have released a fully-downloadable Actor Lab.

Actor-lab is a parallel, object-oriented control language designed to introduce the ideas of control technology and robotics. Actor-lab was designed to make the teaching of control technology possible in classroom settings where, after a general introduction by the teacher, year 5-7 children work by themselves in small groups with only peer support. The language and the interface were designed to represent the notion of input-process-output that is central to basic robotics and control technology. It’s operation can be explained using the intuitively accessible metaphor of a cast of actors able to send messages to each other. The programmers role becomes one of playwright, writing scripts for the actors.

It’s fantastic to see what Peter has the 10-year-olds creating with Lego robots, and in a way that their teachers can follow, unlike certain popular Lego-robot languages I’ve seen in the past. Definitely worth a look!