“Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.”

The collection of magnetic modular units are made up of three categories of blocks, which represent the three basic elements of physical computing: sensing, “thinking”, and actuating. They join with magnets and, no doubt, a satisfying “click”. Snap them together in a valid configuration and away they go (check out the video with the quirky-accented presenter). Judging by the photograph featuring kids using them, they will be targeted at young learners too. It will be interesting to see if the learning activities created for them will be as thoroughly considered as the engineering for the cubelets themselves.

As usual with hot-off-the-press tech, these are only available for pre-order for $160.00, but I think I’ll get in queue now.

What is to be done about this? There are many answers to this question and it’s one reason that the Guardian series makes for good reading. The series highlights the many aspects of the problem, from shortage of qualified teachers, to obliviousness of ministers, to programmes that don’t produce qualified candidates (apparently 14% of computer science graduates still don’t have a job after 6 months), to offshoring of key skills that industry needs, which I mentioned in this article.

The good news is that with the Eye of Mordor turning its attention to the subject, we might perhaps see more support given for improving both pedagogy and research in Computing education. I have my fingers crossed. If you have a moment, saunter over and get a good look, it will confirm your suspicions and just maybe, you’ll cross your fingers too.

For Design prototyping, LittleBits’ main limitation will be that the mounting of the components on boards limits how these pieces can be placed into a physical housing, and in fact, the main idea is to support learning and experimentation, rather than testing out interactivity. However, I can see a compelling case for adding this to the Design Studio trolley of raw materials for exploration and design ideation. I’ll be even more excited to locate a UK distributor!

Farnell have a pretty nifty new enclosure for Arduinos. It’s a specially-designed, black ABS plastic housing that’s injection moulded and contains bosses to hold the Arduino in place. The location of the bosses means that you can either leave the enclosure “as is” for mounting a standard Arduino or if you wish to secure one of the Arduino Megas, you can to remove a boss with a pair of side cutters or a blade. Or you could simply snap it off.

An Arduino Uno/Mega fits perfectly inside, with extra room for a 9V battery and there’s a little inspection door as well. At first glance, I thought the door would facilitate replacing the battery, but it’s more suited to being able to access the reset switch on either a standard- or a mega- size Arduino. Add to this, the box is large enough to also contain a shield, and best of all, there is a knock-out plate that can accommodate an ethernet shield, too. The bulge this creates on the top of the box is slightly inconvenient, and the housing will not lay flat on that side, but this is a minor issue. The obverse has a sligtly recessed face which could accommodate a decorative label or of course, the necessary radioactive/hazmat warning.

At about £9.00 plus shipping, the price is slightly on the high-side. But considering that it is perfectly suited for its job, and you don’t need to muck about with drilling even a single hole simply to house an Arduino project (as you would with a generic enclosure), it’s pretty much worth the cost. Shoot on over to Farnell to pick one up one of these little guys.

Note: the photo on the website makes it appear to be a semi-transparent enclosure, but this is simply to show that the enclosure can also accommodate an Arduino shield. The housing is solid, opaque black.

The release of MoR almost coincided with another app, iBats (see my Projects and posts about that). Special thanks are due to my colleagues Adam Talcott and Crystal Campbell for their excellent collaboration on the project.

More details about Mammals on Roads are on the PTES website.

Here’s the press release.

This step, data cleaning, is usually a real hassle and Excel is not very good for the task, because it’s not really made to do this sort of thing. Although you can delimit by commas, tabs or arbitrary characters, it’s a pain to write regular expressions that allow you to take out things or re-order them. You can write scripts to do this, but then you’re busy writing scripts instead of creating a visualization.

That’s why I’m very excited about Wrangler, a new tool for data wrangling that substantially reduces the pain associated with this process.

Check out their video and head on over to try it for yourself!