Sense is an educational programming environment created by

The Open University The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off- ...

(OU) in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. It uses a drag-and-drop programming environment designed to teach students the fundamentals of

computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as ana ...

, using different shape and colour "blocks" selected from a palette of available commands, meaning that the student needs no prior experience of programming nor need to learn a syntax. It is based on the Scratch programming language developed by the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

, and uses .sb files like Scratch but the two pieces of software cannot use each other's files. The Sense programming environment is designed to work in conjunction with the SenseBoard, a specialised piece of hardware which connects to a user's computer via a

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

connection. The SenseBoard has different input types such as sensors for infrared, light, sound (microphone), and temperature (thermometer), and outputs such as a

motor An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power gen ...

and

light emitting diode A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits light when current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy in the form of photons. The color of the light (cor ...

s (LEDs). Sense and the SenseBoard are primarily used as part of the OU's ''My Digital Life (TU100)'' module, but is also used to a lesser degree on other modules. Sense was trialed in London schools in late 2012.

References

External links

{{Official website, sense.open.ac.uk Visual programming languages Educational programming languages Pedagogic integrated development environments 2008 software Smalltalk programming language family Open University