Although the Arduino project was (in the words of the founders) "intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interactive objects", the programming side of things can be a little scary for some people and put them off making their own interactive objects. However if this is you, or you've found somone who would find Arduino interesting but isn't ready to write some code - then check out the "Ardublock" graphical programming environment for Arduino.
It's an environment that runs on top of the Arduino IDE, and provides a very simple drag-and-drop method of creating instructions by simply placing various functions (that are represented as blocks) in the required order of operation. Then when you're finished, the Ardublock environment writes the Arduino sketch and uploads it to the board for you, as shown in the following example:
And after some use, hopefully the user will become more comfortable with the code generated by Ardublock and move on to writing sketches directly. Nevertheless it's an open-source project so you can download Ardublock and try it for yourself. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
If you're new to Arduino and want to join the fun, the first step is a solid board for your projects - our Freetronics Eleven - the Arduino-Uno compatible with low-profile USB socket, onboard prototyping space and easy to view LEDs:
