Miles Fletcher
New Member
In April 2010. a group of six programmers (myself included) from the UK and America got together and created Panther, a computer programming language aimed at young people wanting to start programming. It uses a block-like construction to make up code, removing a lot of typing and therefore syntax errors, yet supplying a host of features that let you manipulate the Panther world and sprites inside it as well as interacting with the web and your computer (such as reading/writing to files, reading HTML from web pages and more).
Currently Panther is based on an existing program called "Scratch" which is an open-source language used in schools worldwide, but our next version will no longer be based on Scratch as we are building Panther 2.0 from the ground up.
We are constantly looking to expand our popular programming language and I suggested that using Panther to program a microchip would be a very interesting move and that Picaxe would be a brilliant chip to work with as it is good quality, cheap, easy to use and available worldwide making it appealing to our current users.
I know that the aim of the Picaxe programming editor is to be as simple and easy to use as possible so that children in schools can use and learn from the chips, and we believe that the brilliant block-like layout of Panther would be ideal for making Picaxe programming even easier and therefore appeal to a younger age group, lowering the age boundary of picaxe users.
The finished program will be distributed as a FREE, open source EXE with a smalltalk VM image file. The block script, once run, writes itself to an "output.bas" file and then activates the picaxe comiler to download the script to your picaxe!
Here are some screenshots from the in-development Panther2Picaxe images showing some example mockup blocks and a script in Picaxe basic (with the output script added next to it). The team and I would very much like to hear what you Picaxe users think of the idea, if you have questions or suggestions, feel free to post!
You can see the current Panther site here.
Currently Panther is based on an existing program called "Scratch" which is an open-source language used in schools worldwide, but our next version will no longer be based on Scratch as we are building Panther 2.0 from the ground up.
We are constantly looking to expand our popular programming language and I suggested that using Panther to program a microchip would be a very interesting move and that Picaxe would be a brilliant chip to work with as it is good quality, cheap, easy to use and available worldwide making it appealing to our current users.
I know that the aim of the Picaxe programming editor is to be as simple and easy to use as possible so that children in schools can use and learn from the chips, and we believe that the brilliant block-like layout of Panther would be ideal for making Picaxe programming even easier and therefore appeal to a younger age group, lowering the age boundary of picaxe users.
The finished program will be distributed as a FREE, open source EXE with a smalltalk VM image file. The block script, once run, writes itself to an "output.bas" file and then activates the picaxe comiler to download the script to your picaxe!
Here are some screenshots from the in-development Panther2Picaxe images showing some example mockup blocks and a script in Picaxe basic (with the output script added next to it). The team and I would very much like to hear what you Picaxe users think of the idea, if you have questions or suggestions, feel free to post!
You can see the current Panther site here.
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