Computer programming education in elementary schools in Israel is constantly rising. As most of the textual programming languages are based on the English language, as well as they have strict syntax requirements, elementary school student face many difficulties using them. In order to overcome these challenges, we suggest using a simple visual programming language, called "PuppetBlocks", for programming an interactive puppet, made by ESP32 micro-controller and MicroPython firmware. By using Google Blockly library with BIPES platform, such a puppet can be used for teaching both the concepts of algorithmic thinking and the basics of programming in Python.
This project is based on a previous work, by A. G. D. S. Junior et. al. (2020). In this work, a framework for website-based visual programming language for controlling micro-controllers using MicroPython firmware was presented. Please read the paper for more details about this work:
Junior, Andouglas Gonçalves Da Silva et. al. 2020. “ BIPES: Block Based Integrated Platform for Embedded Systems.” In IEEE Access, volume 8, pages 197955-197968.. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3035083.
This work is submitted as the final project in the course "Project in The Internet of Things"
(236333), at The Interdisciplinary Center for Smart Technologies (ICST), Taub Faculty of
Computer Science, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. This project was written by
Orel Adivi (orel.adivi [at] cs.technion.ac.il), Hila Ginzburg
(hila.gin [at] campus.technion.ac.il), and Noy Shmueli (noyshmueli [at] campus.technion.ac.il),
and under the supervision of Assel Aborokn, Tom Sofer, and Itai Dabran, Ph.D. . The work was done in about
an academic semester and is released under GNU General Public License v3.0.
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The main way in which the elementary school students interact with the system is using the website, available on https://codingblocks5.github.io/PuppetBlocks/. This is a static, single page frontend-based website, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, allowing the students to program the micro-controller. Beside the general blocks that were presented in BIPES, there are 31 unique blocks intend to help the student interact with the device.
The following block categories were added:
- Movement - these blocks are used to control the two servo motors, read the joystick, record movements and performing them.
- Screens - these blocks are used to control the two screens independently, allowing showing images and text and providing fast whitening and blacking function.
- Audio - these blocks are used to control the speaker, allowing playing audio synchronously or asynchronously, once or in loop, and providing easy functions for pausing, resuming, stopping, and checking whether the speaker is currently playing.
- Files - these blocks are used to load files from the cloud to the device, to check whether a file exists, to delete a file on the device, to rename a file on the device, and to get a list of all currently available files on the device.
- Time - these blocks are used to sleep for a specified time or until a specified time, to get the current time or get a unit of it, and to do basic arithmetical calculations connected with time.
Downloading files to the device require previous uploading to the PuppetBlocks cloud, which is stored in PuppetBlocks' Cloud Storage for Firebase. The website allows a simple uploading and viewing a list of all currently available files in the cloud. Executing the code is possible either using a serial (USB) connection or using WiFi with MicroPython WebREPL. It is possible to download the current code to a local file and to upload previously downloaded files from the local computer. The interface is available on English, with a basic support for Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and Russian.
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