Commands for Cricket-MicroWorlds communication

• sendmessagetomicroworlds: This command will send a numerical message to the MicroWorlds program. For example, if you tell the Cricket "sendmessagetomicroworlds 1" the robot will send the number 1 to MicroWorlds.

• messagefromrobot: This command reads the message sent from the robot. For example, if you tell MicroWorlds 

if messagefromrobot = 1 [melody1]

MicroWorlds will play a melody file if it reads the number 1 from the robot. You would want to loop this, as in a button set to forever.

Logo Word Counter

numwords, pr count parse words
where "words" and "numwords" are text boxes and words is the box containing text to count.

Logo Timer

Given, you have a text box on the screen named "time," the following makes a nice timer:
to start
make "seconds "60
repeat 61
[time, pr :seconds
wait 10
ct
make "seconds :seconds - 1]
end

MicroWorlds ver 1.7 for Windows

I just installed the upgrade to MicroWorlds EX Robotics for Windows, version 1.7, and was thrilled to see not just support for the NXT but also the Cricket! I can't believe how much of an upgrade this is. And the help resources are robot-specific, so if you've checked the NXT, for example, and restarted the program, you'll see Robotics resources only for the NXT. One things I've learned from this is that different variations of Logo aren't dependent on the programs that you use it with so much as the robotic hardware you use it with, or maybe it's both.

Snaparea command

I've been finding the MicroWorlds EX snaparea command really useful recently. It's come in handy when I've needed to turn some text into a graphic that can be used as a shape for turtles. In this project (here for web, here for download) I made for a kid to learn some counting skills I made a text box and moved it to the coordinates [0 0], typed in the number 1 and made it larger, then ran the command snaparea 1 [-5 5] [20 20] in the command center and there was my '1' graphic in the shapes panel. The first set of coordinates is the upper left corner of the graphic and the second set is the length across and down from there. I did the same for the other nine numbers but changed the number after the command so they'd be different shape numbers. After giving 10 different turtles these graphics as shapes and making each turtle reveal a number of other turtles when clicked, she could then click a nice big number to see how much it represents. I could have used buttons with numbers as the labels, but they would have been so small.

Another more involved project (download only) is one I made for a French teacher that allows her to import her own pictures and type sentences (on the teacher page) which then become graphics the students drag on to the pictures on a Smart Board. When the right sentence touches the picture they get a "Bravo!" Snaparea comes into play when the sentences on page6 are being copied to graphics used by the turtles on each page.