Python GoPiGo Robot workshop

Background

Following on from our Scratch Robot Workshop we’ve been running a second workshop that allows our students to apply some of the Python skills gained from previous Code Club World projects. This workshop lets students connect to the GoPiGo robot to read and understand example scripts, and also see how abstraction is used to simply programming using functions. The information gathered by learning to reverse-engineer existing scripts is used to creat their own script, using sensors to gather information from the robot’s environment and allow it to perform various tasks. Although the workshop gives a specific example for this task, the process can then be repeated to learn how to interact with other sensors and add new features to the robot.

The workshop

I’ve included a [copy of the workshop document here](/pdfs/Robot Workshop 2 GoPiGo-v0.3.pdf), that we’ve been working off, to use as a base to run your own workshops. There’s now a number of different ways to connect to the Raspberry Pi on the GoPiGo, and we have used both the browser method, as well as connecting via an terminal connection directly (using SSH). The idea here is to allow enough options that you can find one that will work well in your environment. Having the confidence to show students that the command line interface (CLI) is nothing to be afraid of has been useful to both get them feeling comfortable about weaning off visual interfaces, and makes it easier for future Python projects that can work on the relatively inexpensive Raspberry Pi with many available add-on boards and sensors.