Education

Education
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Created by Zsolt Szrapkó | April 6, 2016

SBrick was designed from the beginning as a powerful and fun tool for teaching robotics and programming.
One of the many advantages of using SBrick is that it is not tied to a specific programming language; you can code in the language of your choice, send the commands to the SBrick and bring your programmed LEGO creation to life.
It’s that simple. And as SBrick is compatible with LEGO Power Functions, this allows you to use those spare LEGO parts you have lying around - it’s a win-win!

SBrick makes learning, and teaching, robotics FUN.

What we are working on

Currently we are hard at work at making SBrick compatible with more and more learning tools, so that you get the smoothest and best teaching experience possible. There are several programming tools we are focused on which we will be announcing as soon as they are ready.

The first such tool we are proud to announce that works beautifully with SBrick is Scratch, a free-to-use language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten
Group at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, MA.

Scratch

Scratch is a programming language which encourages young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. To run the latest version of Scratch , you need a relatively recent web browser (Chrome 35 or later, Firefox 31 or later, or Internet Explorer 9 or later) with Adobe Flash Player version 10.2 or later installed. Scratch 2 is designed to support screen sizes 1024 x 768 or larger. If your computer doesn’t meet these requirements, you can try downloading and installing Scratch 1.4. Scratch uses a delightful drag-and-drop user interface which makes coding, and programming fun to learn.

Using SBrick with Scratch

What you’ll need

  • An SBrick of course, and something to put it into. You can buy this from our store, and get a lot of ideas on our site.

  • If you use factory installed Windows 10 you can use our SBrick Scratch Plugin for Windows 10. With the plugin, your PC can connect directly to the SBrick or SBrick Plus. Find out more at: SBrick Scratch Plugin for Windows 10 - How To

  • If you use Chrome OS, please use this plugin: SBrick Scratch plugin for Chrome OS. Find out more at: SBrick Scratch Plugin for Chrome OS - How to.

  • If you use OSX, Linux or you have an old or non factory installed Windows 10, you will need a BLED112 USB bluetooth dongle from Bluegiga / Silicon Labs (you can buy it from our store, and the S2bot helper application from PicAxe. This application can connect to various robotic platform such as PicoBoard, Sphero, Ollie, BB8, and of course SBrick. This application acts like a “glue” between the browser and the hardware by providing a tiny web server on your computer, so it can “translate” from browser to hardware and vica versa. Follow the installation instruction described on the site.

  • A Scratch account and a little bit of experience using Scratch. Visit https://scratch.mit.edu/ to register, and start your adventure with programming.

If you have all the ingredients, all you need to do is to turn on your SBrick powered model, connect the dongle, start and connect S2Bot, and fire up Scratch to start programming. We’ll describe these steps in a little bit more detail below.

S2Bots instruction pages

SBrick Scratch plugin instruction pages

Download our example Scratch files



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