Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms

Re:Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's... by erlehmann_ on Saturday August 27, 2016 @12:22PM (#12372971)

> And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even estimate distance.

Ha, I did that as well with Mindstorms RCX in like 11th grade or so! Later, in university, Mindstorms NXT was used: Our first assignment was to follow a track on the ground and the team I was the only one had two programs, one for recording the track with the sensors and another for following the previously recorded track in high speed without using sensors at all.

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Re:Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's... by taliesinb on Saturday August 27, 2016 @12:38PM (#12373059)

Cool hack. So you had to do multiple laps? It's interesting that dead reckoning actually worked, we had lacquered wooden floor in my house and the slip was quite bad, dead reckoning never worked.

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Re:Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's... by erlehmann_ on Saturday August 27, 2016 @03:16PM (#12373723)

We were allowed to do multiple laps. I stopped attending the (non-mandatory) course after I saw that the other teams were no challenge and some even had problems to just follow a line.

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Re:Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's... by stordoff on Saturday August 27, 2016 @01:17PM (#12373216)

Reminds me of a hack we used in the First Lego League. One of the challenges was to unlock a gate, and we ran out of time for designing the necessary hardware/software. Instead, we just had a program that drove full speed in a set direction. About 1/10 times, it'd hit the gate just right and open it.

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