My Computing club coded this solution to control the Maplin Robot Arm with the Raspberry Pi and also Pygame.  Pygame adds the control of the movements of the arm which are mapped to the keyboard.  The students then decided to code up another Arm and play basketball, then some of them wanted to have a Robot brawl!! 
GETTING STARTED:
  1. Buy the Maplin Robot
  2. Build it: takes about 2 and a half hours
  3. Update your Pi software: sudo apt-get update
  4. Maybe upgrade: sudo apt-get upgrade
  5. Install PyUSB allowing access to the Robot Arm
  6. The easiest way to do this is to clone the GIT repository, step 7
  7. git clone https://github.com/walac/pyusb.git 
  8. Once Installed move to the pyusb folder, type cd pyusb 
  9. Then type the code sudo python setup.py install
  10. Reboot the Raspberry Pi, sudo reboot
  11. Plugged in the Robot Arm and away we go!
  12. An example program
  13. Use the LX terminal run the program using sudo python ....