Raspberry Pi Forums

Hi,

I'm considering introducing my niece to Scratch. (+ GPIO stuff) I have an old Pi that I can donate. The problem is she doesn't actually have a monitor and keyboard, nor do I think she would be able to get those.

She does have an Android tablet, though, so I was thinking, would it be possible to somehow run Scratch on the tablet to program on the Pi? (for the GPIO) Or a different solution entirely? Doesn't even have to be Scratch, if there's anything similar out there. Just not anything purely text based.

VNC comes to mind, but I don't know if that would be a great experience. I should try it.

Try out VNC, it'll probably work better than you expect. Some of the UI controls don't translate perfectly to touch screen usage but in general it works pretty decent.

There are a few VNC apps for Android, each of them handles this mouse/touch translation a bit differently.

RealVNC is probably your best option, if using the GPIO is absolutely necessary.
Using RealVNC to click buttons is rather easy, but to drag-n-drop takes a double-tap. Scratch is 100% drag-n-drop. Those double-taps will get tiresome quickly.

If you can do without GPIO, then maybe running Scratch directly on the tablet would be better.