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If you have even a bit of interest into electronic modules or thinking of building a robotic project for your school or college, Makeblock is a great place to start with. It is an open source construction platform which provides mechanical and electronic modules to get some ideas turn into a reality. You can look for any right from beams, plates to connectors, drivers and controllers.
The team behind the company has initiated a project called as mBot. This project is hosted on Kickstarter for public funding with an idea to bring kids a little closer to programming, robotics and still keep it fun. Priced at $49, they want every kid to have their own robot and get smarter.
We received a review kit of the same module, to try & share our expert comments on what we think, specially to find if that $49 is really worth it or not. The project is based on Arduino Platform, Robotics, Scratch (A visual way to program aka graphical programming), mBlock and a few more stuff.
While we haven’t started with the programming part, here is our first impression of the module you will receive and the quality of the product you can expect.
The assembling part is pretty easy. You have all the tools like the screw driver, nuts, bolts, mules in place. It took me a little over 20 minutes to get all done, but if you have more experience with assembling this kind of stuff, it will be 10 minutes tops. The make and quality of each item in the package is excellent & I can confidently say that there is no compromise with the quality.
You will need 4 set of rechargeable battery to get this running. However if you can find a battery back which is concealed, there is another port which can take that as a source of power. More in the next video where we share more about our experience.
Overall this project looks worth if you want to start your kids with programming and robotics. The price is absolutely affordable, the stuff you get in package is of high quality and Scratch is a powerful tool. You should give this a try. Follow this link.
