Entries in Life

Yesterday was great. I sat down with Ginger, Basil, and Violet and we put together a Lego Rover ‘bot. Not much. Just something to move forward, backward, turn, and respond when bumping into stuff.

Not only were the kids hooked (especially Basil), but I am, too. I'm thinking up lesson plans and developing programs to help me with them. I've asked dvfmama to go over angles with the kids so that they can program the rover to roll out simple shapes.

On my end, I'm looking at making adjustments to the the XSLisp interface and thinking of writing either a GTK or Emacs (of course!) front end to it.

That, and a simple library of functions will make this effort a lot simpler.

I’ll be posting a short HOWTO for getting XSLisp running on the latest BrickOS shortly.

Tomorrow, our adventures into programming Lego Mindstorms begin. It took a little doing, but I managed to get XSLisp compiled and working on my brick. I’ll be posting a HOWTO shortly.

For starters, we’re just going to build a simple rover using the program in this paper. You could consider this cheating since I haven’t had time to come up with anything really didactic.

That’s ok, though. I don’t want to bore them to tears right out of the gate. Perhaps we’ll take the rover and modify it somehow over time.