The Improper Bostonian: Bots for Tots – A high-tech Toy Brings Coding to the Kindergarten Set
The Improper Bostonian features the KIBO robot in this article about bringing a screen-free, tangible way for kindergarten aged children to learn how to code.
The article reads in part:
“Marina Umaschi Bers is accustomed to presenting research to fellow academics. But when she started sharing her work on KIBO—a programmable robot designed to be developmentally appropriate for kids ages 4 to 7—her colleagues’ reactions weren’t quite what she expected. “I’m presenting my slides, and people would raise their hands, and I was waiting for the questions on the statistics and significant results,” she recalls. “But always the first question is ‘How can I get one?’”
Until recently, they couldn’t. KIBO started out as a hand-built prototype, reflecting years of work by Bers and her students at Boston College’s DevTech Research Group. They went through three generations of development, drawing on feedback from more than 400 kids and 50 teachers at local schools. The result: a robot kids can assemble, decorate and command, using a programming language built on wooden blocks, each representing a different action. “There’s no computer, no keyboard, no screens of any kind,” Bers explains. Instead, kids snap the blocks into a sequence and scan the bar code on each using the “mouth” of the KIBO, which also comes with sensors shaped like an ear (for sound), an eye (for light) and a telescope (for gauging distance). Press a button and presto: The robot can wheel around, beep, sing, shake, spin and flash colored lights, mimicking a ballerina, a helicopter, a dogsled or whatever else its pint-sized programmer imagines.”
Read the full article.
