Teaching Kids Programming using Web Browsers and Real Robots

Tim explains:

There are not enough good programmers in the world so I had the idea to help by instilling a love for programming in kids via simple hardware kits and a webpage.

To demonstrate this technology, you will see my son live-code a small program and send it to a robot on stage.

This is a multi-year hobby project, but this particular demo involves the following parts:

• Bytecode Interpreter written in C running on the microcontroller inside the robot.
• Compiler written in JavaScript running in the webpage
• Bridge written in luvit that serves the webpage and sends programs to the robot. (http + websockets + tcp)

Partially implemented components not in the demo include:

• Git implementation written in JavaScript that runs in the browser and acts as client to global code repository.
• High Level language that kids write that's compiled by JS and pulls in dependencies via websockets and git implementation in JS.

I plan on writing a blog post on luvit.io soon and/or porting the server to a packaged app to run offline on chromebooks (which kids often have access to in school).