KidsLab - a podcast for parents and educators passionate about STEAM education

In this episode I am talking to Neil Fraser, the inventor of Blockly. Blockly is a JavaScript library for building visual programming editors.

Neil works as a software engineer at Google in Mountain View, California, USA - for more than a decade. In his spare time he’s an active maker and tinkerer and also created a variety of open source software.

Neil is also the initial creator of Blockly - a JavaScript library for building visual programming editors. We’ve covered block-based, visual programming in quite a few episodes now, but one can really say that Blockly has had a huge impact on the edtech world, if not even THE biggest impact.

Block-based programming uses interlocking blocks to create code, that means there is no syntax to get wrong such as in text-based coding. Block-based coding is a great way for kids - but also their parents and teachers - to learn about computer programming. The colorful blocks and the built-in validation mechanisms make it easy to create functional programs while reducing the issues that beginners often have.

In this episode, I am talking to Joern Alraun, managing partner at Calliope gGmbH about the Boson Starter Kit for the Calliope Mini Single Board Computer.

Jørn is an interaction designer, co-founder of several companies with a focus on developing digital learning toys and he is a member of the Interaction Design Association.

More importantly, at least for this interview, he is a managing partner at Calliope gGmbH so he is well aware of everything that concerns the Calliope Mini single board computer which is used at schools and workshops to teach kids about logic and coding.

So the Boson Starter Kit for Calliope includes an extension board and several sensors and actuators. These can be plugged into the extension board easily with the provided cables. Everything comes in a nice case and DFRobot even included some getting started cards that show where each sensor or actuator needs to be connected as well as a simple visual coding example - and believe me: these cards really make a difference in a workshop setting.

In this episode, I am talking to Lorraine Underwood about her book Save the World with Code. It’s a book filled with great projects for the Raspberry PI, Adafruit Circuit Playground and the BBC micro:bit.
Lorraine is originally from Ireland and now lives in the UK with her husband and two young boys. She is a trained secondary school teacher in Information Communication Technology and currently works at Lancaster University as a Senior Teaching Associate, teaching Applied and Creative Computing to undergraduate students.

Her book - Save the World with Code - that just recently got published in May 2020, includes 20 fun projects for the Raspberry Pi, the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express and the BBC micro:bit. She’s really chosen the top educational boards out there with the biggest communities - that’s a guarantee for a lot of fun and if needed excellent support, too. And the really cool thing is that very often you can choose which tool to use for the particular project - so for most of the 20 projects, you get to choose which computing board you want to use!

We’re talking to Tat Leong, the CTO of Codomo from Singapore about Potato Pirates, a fun coding game for the whole family.

The Codomo team is made up of pioneer students from the Singapore University of Technology and Design, where problem-solving via design thinking was a central component of their studies.

Their first Kickstarter was a game called Potato Pirates. Potato Pirates is a coding card game that is designed to get children to learn 10 hours of programming concepts in just 30 minutes without computers. Codomo has also designed a curriculum that integrates with Scratch, making coding less intimidating, more engaging, and lots of fun.

I am talking to Bambi Brewer about the new Finch Robot 2.0. Bambi is the director of Engineering at Birdbrain Technologies, the creators of the Finch Robot. Bambi works from the beginning to the end of the development process to design new products, ensure software is reliable and easy to use, and create curriculum pathways to help take robotics projects to the next level.

She has a bachelor in math and physics from Rhodes College, and a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. She has experience in education at all levels and has been designing robotics curricula since 2013. In her free time, she raises a teenager and knits obsessively.

Let’s have a look at the Finch Robot v2, BirdBrain’s latest creation. It’s of course the successor of the popular first Finch Robot and a big shift is the use of the BBC micro:bit as a computational brain of this robot. The finch is a robot that targets kids from Kindergarten to college and allows them to experience their coding creations in a hands-on, physical way.

The micro:bit already features quite a few sensors, such as the accelerometer or buttons. But Finch 2.0 adds even more cool stuff: a whiteboard marker holder, color LEDs, buzzer, light sensor, distance sensor and even line tracking sensor. It’s powered by a rechargeable battery that lasts 7+ hours. And little details make it special for me - things as visual markers on the wheels so you can count the iterations easily.

That’s the geeky hardware bit - the software looks even more exciting with block-based programming in all forms and apps as well as text-based coding supported. We go into details in the interview.