Codecraft 2.5 Release Introduction
Codecraft is a graphical programming software suitable for students ages 6-18, who are learning to program. Codecraft is based on the Scratch 3.0 language and enables programming by simply “dragging and dropping” blocks. In addition to Scratch’s ability to program interactive games or animations, Codecraft also supports a variety of common hardware devices, enabling hardware and software integration, which makes programming even more fun!
The first version of Codecraft was released by TinkerGen in July 2018. Since then it was continuously updated with new functions and hardware. Codecraft 1.x only supported the Grove Zero series. Now, Codecraft supports 7 different development boards, including Arduino Uno/Mega and BBC Micro:bit. Another major update was in December 2018, when Codecraft 2.0 was released and the IDE became accessible online. A set of new extensions was added allowing access to Deep Learning capabilities in Stage mode, such as
- Face/Face landmark detection
- Emotion recognition
- Speech command recognition
- Custom model Training and Inference
The next milestone for Codecraft was version 2.5, released just a week ago. This version starts on the path of seamlessly integrating Make2Learn (TinkergGen online course platform) into Codecraft. It makes teaching programming easier than ever by combining rich media content of the course and programming environment in one window! Let’s see how it works in practice.
When you go to https://ide.tinkergen.com/ you are greeted with a brand new Lessons interface. Here you can click on any lesson to start learning it or you can click on Create Online to start creating programs from scratch.
If you are a complete beginner to graphical programming or teaching students that have never tried using a graphical programming environment before, you can start with a series of lessons to learn the basics of Codecraft.
There you can go through the slides and videos of the lesson(1), switch between chapters in the lesson(2) and load the example programs into IDE if you’re experiencing troubles to see the solution.
To see Codecraft Deep Learning extension in action you can try clicking on Emoji Game lesson, which utilizes emotion recognition in Stage Mode.
Codecraft has come a long way since the first version in 2018 and we will continue improving it and adding more features to provide our users with a better experience! We welcome your suggestions and feedback, which you can give by pressing the Help – Feedback button in the Codecraft interface.
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