February 2010 – Observations from Uppsala

Kindergarten Robot 2: Going Programmable

As discussed in my previous blog post about Kindergarten robots, I wanted to see if I can teach kids the core idea of programming. This project has now progressed to the point that I have a working prototype of a programmable robot.

Essentially, the robot is programmed by putting colored Lego bricks in a sequence on top of the robot. This should be accessible and direct enough to work with kids — and with no computer needed, just direct physical interaction with the system. For some reason, I think the extra level of abstraction from a screen to a robot is just an unnecessary obstacle at this level.

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Describe is not the same as Design

The discussion on my previous blog post about “the ideal ESL language” made me think some more about the purpose of a hardware modeling or description language. If you look closely, you realize that there are two quite different goals being pursued by the tools and languages discussed there.

On one hand, we have the task of supporting the design of new hardware bits, for the purpose of creating it. On the other hand, we have the task of describing a particular design for the purpose of simulating it. These two are not necessarily the same.

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Kindergarten Robot

lego mindstorms nxt2 One of my little projects while on parental leave has been to play around with my Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 robotics kit. Apart from being fun for a serious dad like myself, I always had in mind how I could use it with kids to get them interested in technology.

When I was a PhD student in Uppsala back around 2000, we bought a pile of the Lego Mindstorms RCX kits, for use in real-time courses. Obviously, the students loved the opportunity to play with Lego (including the few females). What was less obvious and much more interesting was what happened when we brought in a bunch of children from a local kindergarten to visit — they really took a liking to our little yellow robots running around a classroom. They treated the robots as little animals, wondering what they were doing and why…

With that in mind, I decided to try to reprise this myself with my own son and his kindergarten friends. Last week, I took my robot kit with me and went to meet the kids.

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500K Spam

We recently had a malfunction in our spam filters at work, so I had to go back and review the catch for possible false positives. I sort things into two bins using spamassassin, one for most likely spam, and one for probable spam. When things started to go bad, the most likely folder had reached more than 2 GB, and the probable some 500 MB.

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