Myro robot programming interface

I was just pointed to the Myro robot programming interface, which seems to an API for the IPRE Robot,. They say

The entire robot kit (robot + Fluke add on board) is available for $199.98 at Georgia Robotics.

But that seems to be misleading: there are two pieces, the Parallax Scribbler Robot and the Fluke add-on board, and each piece seems to be $200. Either I misread the Georgia Robotics site or the IPRE website misreported the cost.

The  Myro Reference Manual has a number of functions defined in a Python module, allowing fairly high level control of the robot.  It looks like fun toy for a robotics class (maybe usable by the Robotics Club we’ve started at my son’s high school), but the API (Applications Programming Interface) seems to me to have somewhat too high a level of abstraction for a robotics club (Logo-turtle-like movement commands, for example, with no access to the motors or servos of the robot itself).  It is clearly an API that is useful for only this one robot, not a more general robotics language.

Given the goals of the IPRE project (“applies and evaluates robots as a context for computer science education”), their decision to create a simple low-cost robot and provide a high-level API is not a bad one.  They are not trying to teach robotics, but computer science, and so a higher level or abstraction where many of the interesting robotics problems have been abstracted away may well be appropriate.

I think that embedding an API in Python is an excellent idea though, as Python is powerful and easy-to-use, and so makes a good first or second programming language.  The lack of easy multi-threading (unlike Scratch), is a bit of a limitation, though.