Makeblock has given me a wonderful trip into the past by writing programs with a fun interactive result.
Like many I purchased my first Makeblock as a gift for a youth, and like many, it took some doing to get it going.
We learned Scratch and had fun writing programs to move around the Panda while the robot stuff got worked out.
To all who struggle with the support issues please take heart, support is here. This is a GREAT toy, and a GREAT opportunity to build the future engineers and masters of technology we need. What a world when we have programmable little robots as toys.
The Makeblock software is used as ‘Sketch’ in schools for teaching, and that same child returned to school after vacation to find his technology class being ‘introduced’ to it. He surprised his teacher that day 
Ahh when I was about that age …luckily I had a math teacher who was a geek…in 1978.
Thanks to his subscription to Creative Computing magazine and a terminal with a connection to the school district’s mainframe, we could sit and type in lines of code for hours after school. That was as good as it got back then.
With so many advances and distractions and things that work without us knowing how, it is a challenge to get young people to learn the technologies of an increasingly complex world.
For me it was easy, because simply accessing a computer was a feat, an amazement. So whatever happened was gravy from there.
But to make a game on a computer…when none such existed? It was our own personal Mt Everest, and when it worked, well, I remember it nearly 40 years later.
Having found it in the archives of this wonderful Internet thing 
, I simply had to share.
So before there was Asteroids, Pacman, DOOM, et al, there was SCHMOO:
