Looking for a "palmby" for educational use…

[krank]

I'm one of the KS backers, and I am absolutely blown away by the Thumby. What an awesome device!

But as an educator (programming, students are 16-18yrs) what has impressed me the most is the IDE. It's absolutely fantastic, a truly excelent resource. Coding, graphics and emulation in a simple package, no installs etc while still being full-featured and a very neat and practical way to do game development.

However, I find the thumby itself… not 100% ideal for educational use. The students have a hard time using them, or "seeing the point". It's not unusable by any means, but I find myself wishing there'd be something like the Arduboy or the PicoSystem in size, but with an IDE like the Thumby. I like the Arduboy a lot, but it's development tools require installation and are more fiddly than the all-on-one IDE of the Thumby.

I know the obvious answer here is "just make one yourself, you lazy entitled a**". I'm well aware I'm not owed anything and that this is a DIY community. If I had the time I'd absolutely dive into the github repo of the IDE and try to see if I can make it work with the PicoSystem or something. But right now I don't. Sorry. Just thought I might check, to see if what I dream of already exists or if anyone's already working on it.

So… Any suggestions? Any projects I should be made aware of?

[lennevia]

Hi there krank!

Really happy to hear you like the Thumby Code Editor. The team and community worked hard on making programming on Thumby accessible in both MicroPython and Blockly online.

There's nothing planned for now in making a larger Thumby, but the Code Editor itself has an emulated Thumby that can be used in the classroom setting in place of the physical hardware. For updates on Arduboy or Picosystem support, I'd recommend asking on their forums. If they wanted to collaborate on one big code editor that works for all of us, I don't think we'd be against that.

We're more active on thumby discussions on our Discord if you wanted to join, many members have the other small gaming consoles and might have more answers for you: https://discord.gg/vzf3wQXVvm

Cheers,
Réna