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The Future of Lego Mindstorms EV3 Programming
Moving From LabView to Scratch
In November 2019, Lego released a brand new version of the EV3 programming environment, currently available only on MacOS. According to Lego’s official announcement,
The former version of the EV3 Lab software is not compatible with the recent release of Apple’s operating system for Mac computers, called ‘Catalina’. We have therefore decided to replace the current EV3 Lab software and EV3 Programming App with a completely new app, called LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Education EV3 Classroom. Featuring a coding language based on Scratch, EV3 Classroom will initially launch for macOS in November 2019 and in spring 2020 for iOS, Windows 10, Android and Chrome. EV3 Classroom will offer a consistent experience, features, and content across all devices. The first release of EV3 Classroom will be in US English, followed by the other 15 EV3 languages in spring 2020.
The new Mac app is called EV3 Classroom, or Mindstorms Home, respectively of the education and home set. However, previously the educational version of the software has certain features, such as data logging, not available in the home version. This distinction no longer exists in the new platform. The two apps are the same underneath the hood. As far as I can tell, the Mindstorms Home app contains five models for learning purposes and the Classroom app features only four. In both versions you can work on your own projects and the functionalities are exactly the same.
However, the Classroom version has extensive teacher resources and numerous “curriculum alignment” statements.
The adoption of Scratch as the official EV3 programming tool signifies a radical break from more than a decade of using LabVIEW, a visual diagram based programming language owned by National Instruments. As readers who are familiar with EV3 education would know, to use MIT’s Scratch platform with EV3 is not new in itself. EV3 can work with Python, Swift Playground and…
