A dancing, laser beam-shooting robot aspires to teach kids how to code
The Codeybot dances, plays music, changes colors and even shoots laser beams -- all to entice little tykes to start programming.
The coding toy from Shenzhen-based startup Makeblock is just the latest on the edutainment bandwagon taking things up a techie notch. It joins a talking, projectile-firing robot, a remote-controlled origami robot, code-teaching drones, and even a crawly "Code-a-Pillar" in a trend of code-teaching toys that seems to have become all the rage in the past few months alone.
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Within 24 hours of launching on Kickstarter on Tuesday, the Codeybot has already reached nearly 90% of its $100,000 funding goal.
The toy looks like a self-balancing white cheese triangle on wheels that moves with a remote control app. It's equipped with an LED screen to display messages and funny faces from your smartphone, and it can repeat what you say back in a cartoony voice.
It's the mBlocky app that aims to teach some principles of coding. The app lets users drag and drop graphical blocks on an iPad to program Codeybot. This is intended to help people feel how coding works.
It's based on Google's Blockly library for building visual programming editors, and is touted to form the basis for kids to learn other programming languages, and importantly, creative problem solving.
Codeybot is based on an earlier failed project
If the Codeybot looks familiar to Kickstarter hawks, it's because Makeblock had a previous and very similar project called Gemini that it pulled after only meeting 25% of its funding goal on the crowdfunding platform.
The makers told Mashable Codeybot is an "improved version of Gemini," but did not specify how. They noted that Codeybot's battle mode allows people to pit their bots against each other, which the team is expecting to be a popular feature.
Benjamin Joffe, a partner at HAX, an accelerator for hardware startups in Shenzhen which mentored Makeblock, told us the flurry of new tech-teaching gadgets are targeting an important problem: the ability to not be intimidated by technology and to be more than a user swiping right or left.
The trick is to be able to go from producing "kits for makers" to "consumer robots."
DIY computing projects based on the Arduino and Raspberry Pi are on the rise, but for newbies, traditional in-class learning methods can be a drag. That’s what makes these bots so important, he says.
The trick for makers to find new success, he adds, is to be able to go from producing "kits for makers" to "consumer robots."
“For kids, code has to be a means to an end, and the end should be a form of enjoyment to retain interest,” he said.
Telling a robot to move forward and backward with the occasional spin and LED funny face can have its initial joys, but for US$99 and up, the Codeybot needs to amuse for more than a few days if it can get kids to keep learning.
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Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
