Last Saturday I attended the Burlington Mini Maker Faire. There were several great projects and products on display but there were two that showed off some good programming techniques. The first was an attempt to bring programming to a younger audience. This group set up a booth where you could program a lego Mindstorms robot using their laptop. They had a series of challenges set up and encouraged anyone to try them. It was very similar to turtle exercises: the robots they made had pens and could be told to move forward and back and turn left and right. The second was a table set up by these people who had previously been featured in MAKE: Magazine. They had several projects set up on their table including both analog and digital “hacks.” One of the projects they had on display was a laser range finder that they implemented in Arduino. Here’s a link to their code. The neat thing about Arduino code, which we talked about, is how it consists of a setup code block and then one big while loop. Most of what arduino is good at needs to be done continually (things like monitor sensors and relay data) and the while loop holds those functions. There were lots of other projects there, but these were the best uses of programming that I saw.