What would be great is if you could build a lego machine/robot then plug it in with a USB cable and use it toghether with your Scratch games and projects!
(LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 is a fun coding, building and imagination thing to buy. so to put it in scratch it would be great!)

this has been a thing for a while

cwkmohammed4852 wrote:

this has been a thing for a while

It is “a thing” in the sense that there is now official integration with Lego EV3. However, it is very limited compared to the ScratchX + EV3 library created by: https://github.com/kaspesla

The current official integration is not really usable for a bigger project / teaching, for example:

Color sensor:
- At this moment it is not possible to sense colors
- Currently it can only detect “brightness”
- Expected modes for this sensor are: Color, Light, Ambient Light, RGB

Motors:
- Motors can currently only spin for a given time duration (x seconds this way or that way)
- Missing is: amount of rotations, percentage of power output, execute and stop after a command or continue seamlessly

This is just what I noticed when trying to build an EV3 color sorter. In other words, that's currently impossible. For many other projects / activities this is also too limited.

For anyone that wants to use Scratch with Lego EV3, it's better to work with ScratchX and the EV3 plugin mentioned above. It's not that hard to install, but still a hassle compared to working with the official implementation. Also, ScratchX is Scratch 2.0, not 3.0. So it feels “old” when used to working with 3.0.

P.s.:
I enjoy working with both MIT Scratch as well as Lego EV3. Lego is great but the software UX is lacking when creating more advanced projects. Scratch's UX is great, but misses the connection to real-world “things”. Together they would be a fantastic match for teaching kids.