On Robots and Education

I thought I’d start the new year with a post about the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. More specifically, a post about Ozobot – the winner of the 2015 Kids at Play Interactive Award for Best Robot.

Ozobot is a golf ball sized robot that responds to lines drawn on paper or a tablet. The robot follows the lines and does different things depending on the line’s colour – e.g. spin in a circle or speed up. Ozobot is aimed at ages 7-13 (approx years 2-7 in Australia). They are currently programmed using a proprietory language but will soon progress to Google’s Blockly (a visual programming language). The robots run for about $50 a piece including some apps and support resources.

Robots as education tools
There is a strong push to use robots as tools that teach coding. Robots are very physical, you can touch them, play with them and see a tangible outcome from your code. However, unlike many of the free online courses – robots cost money – approx $50-$400 a unit. Two prominent organisations driving robots as education tools in Australia are Robocup Jnr and FiRST Lego League (FLL) – both based off Lego’s Mindstorm platform. For upper primary/lower middle school – FLL is about $350 to enter.

Other robots include:

• Sphero and Ollie by Connected Play ($80)
• Dash and Dot by Wonder Workshop ($260, ages 5+)
• Kibo by Kinderlab ($220-$400, ages 4-7)
• Bee-Bot by TTS Group ($50-$100, for pre schoolers/ages 3+)

I guess the questions teachers and parents have to weigh up are – which robot do they choose with? What are the benefits of tacticle learning tools like robots vs purely visual tools like those on Code.org. Age plays a clear role in this – most of the robots are cute, have names and seem targeted at ages 5-10 (pre-school and primary school) – this is of course before they hit the more advanced robots used in the Lego competitions.