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The news this week comes from the indoor activities. We have been getting into the challenges of computing and making machines do what they're told.
One of the these machines is Hugh's mechanical computer, the Turing Tumble. It comes with a series of challenges, to steer a ball bearing down a pin-ball style board according to the rules of each challenge. It's amazing to actually see a computer working, in every detail, because it's purely mechanical. Due to size limitations, the Tumble will never compute big numbers, but it's an excellent demonstration of what it could do (if only it were big enough). As an educational tool, it was designed for small fingers and many of us have difficulty with dropping the little ball bearings. That problem was solved with a Tumble simulator to run on your laptop or tablet, which you can take home and share with the family. We can't lose our marbles when they're confined to a screen!
We are also starting to use an electronic computer, the Raspberry Pi. This little marvel is a fully working computer on a credit card sized board. We started last week programming a little animation using a language called Scratch, not wildly exciting yet, but we achieved a lot in just twenty minutes. With a bit more time, it will quickly become more interesting. One important feature of the Pi is its General Purpose Input Output pins. These let us plug in external apparatus to measure and control things. If you can sense something electrically, the Pi can read it. If you can switch something, the Pi can control it. These pins are truly general purpose. We have several demonstrations of this to build up in the coming weeks and we'd like to hear suggestions of anything the Pi could sense or control around the shed.
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