The Finch
The Finch Explained:
The Finch is a new robot for computer science education. Its design is the result of a four year study at Carnegie Mellon's CREATE lab. The Finch is made to easily integrate into high school and college CS courses. Institutions piloting the Finch have shown improved retention and year-over-year enrollment growth in their CS1 courses.
The Finch was designed to allow students to write richly interactive programs. On-board features include:
- Light, temperature, and obstacle sensors
- Accelerometers
- Motors
- Buzzer
- Full-color beak LED
- Pen mount for drawing capability
- Plugs into USB port - no batteries required
The Finch is currently programmable with Java, Python, C++, Visual Basic, Processing, and Scala. Additional language support will be released throughout 2012.
The Finch is manufactured under license from Carnegie Mellon University.
About the Site
finchrobot.com is designed to be much more than a storefront and static informational site. We provide software downloads, lessons, assignments, and a community-oriented site design that allows anyone to form an account, and contribute their own Finch assignments and activities. We even provide incentives for such contributions.
