You can now program the Finch robot from JES

This is pretty exciting for us doing MediaComp.  Tom Lauwers, who has been developing the Finch robot (from CMU), has tweak our Jython Environment for Students (JES) so that Finch support is built-in.  This means that the various supports for Media Computation built into JES (e.g., visualizations for sounds and pixels) are available while programming the Finch in Python.  It’s nice to see the Media Computation software getting picked up and used in new contexts!

Full instructions here:

http://www.finchrobot.com/Creating,%20Compiling,%20and%20Running%20Programs%20for%20Finch/jes-jythonpython

The JES team has allowed us to repackage JES with Finch software libraries, so we now have an incredibly easy way to setup an environment for writing Finch programs in Python. To see how easy, check out our instructions and screencast, which takes you from downloading to writing and running a Finch program in five minutes.

JES (the Jython Environment for Students) was developed to support the Media Computation approach to introductory Computer Science education. Since it was designed for education, it is the perfect first Finch environment: it sports a detailed help section, an easy to use step-by-step debugger, and a number of built-in tools for creating programs that manipulate images, audio, and video. We are very excited to add JES to our list of supported software environments, and again thank the JES team for allowing us to use their hard work!

via JES+Finch – Beta version available | The Finch.