During a week-long buildathon, I worked in a 5 person team to create CodeBlox, modular blocks to teach children computational thinking skills. Blocks can be linked together to write code that controls a Bluetooth enabled robot. Traditional methods of learning to code are centered around a computer, which can limit accessibility. By creating tangible building blocks, we hope to better engage kinesthetic and visual learners, as well as introduce programming concepts to kids at a younger age. Additionally, a physical implementation of coding encourages collaboration between peers.

My role in this project focused primarily on the physical design and assembly of each tile. The tiles are constructed from laser cut wood. Each tile has a 2 sets of 5 pogo pins and copper strips to send and receive data from neighboring tiles. This allows the user to build code both horizontally and vertically. Magnets in the corners of each tile allow them to snap together and make the connections between the pogo pins and copper strips. To facilitate debugging, when each tile is activated, a green LED will blink. If there are any syntactical errors or bugs that cause the code to not compile, the code will run up to that point, and the problematic tile will have a red LED light up. A master tile receives data from each block and sends it via Bluetooth to the robot.

Each tile has a custom PCB board with an ATMEGA328p chip for processing. The pogo pins, copper strips, and connections to the top panel are soldered to the board.