A graphical programming tool is developed in a view to help beginners realize the importance of coding in the form of physical robotic movement. Introducing a programming language to students with no background is often felt to be challenging in terms of syntax and control flow of a language. The paper discusses an open source graphical programming tool built on Minibloq platform that allows students to focus more on creative part of programming. The paper proposes a graphical approach to programming where a student need not remember any constructs of a programming language, but relies on the approach to solve a problem. The programming utility is developed for an open source Arduino platform. Currently the tool is developed to control a real robot built around Arduino platform. Thus a platform to learn fundamentals of programming as well as robotics is made available to students. The graphical programming tool with the robotic hardware was found to be easy to learn by high school students during an outreach program conducted by the authors. The framework is also extendable beyond programming and can be further developed to understand robotics.

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[Formula: see text]-value and half-life of elements in alpha decay chain of [Formula: see text]117, [Formula: see text]117, [Formula: see text]116 and [Formula: see text]116 were calculated using the Nuclear potential generated by double folding procedure and using the WKB method treating the alpha decay as a tunneling problem. The nuclear potential was parameterized using Woods–Saxon potential. Using this approach, the [Formula: see text]-value and half-life of next heaviest element in the alpha decay chain of element [Formula: see text]116 is predicted. It is proposed to use this to predict the [Formula: see text]-value and half-life of other higher elements in different alpha decay chains.