Robots that teach programming to five-year-olds

Company Plays yesterday presented a special campaign - they will produce two robots, which they named Bo and Yana and they can work together or individually. While five-year-olds will play with them (interact with iPad), they will learn programming at the same time. As the company director says Vikas Gupta, technology must evolve in the direction of becoming accessible and fun. Bo and Yana definitely are. Since such young children usually do not know how to type, read and do not have the developed computer skills of adults, everything is based on graphics.

Bo is an explorer, curious and playful, loves adventures and loves meeting new friends. Yana is a storyteller, she is smart and has a lot of imagination. It doesn't have wings yet, but it is full of dreams that a child's imagination can discover.

The program is a sequence of instructions and a small user step by step introduces to a higher level. The programming is played by someone playing the xylophone, for example children's song, and can move forward, backward, left, right and around. All these functions can follow each other to establish some logical movement. In practice, this will mean, as the leaders at Plays, that for his mother's birthday, the five-year-old will program the robot to go into his mother's bedroom and sing her a birthday song. But that's not all. Bo knows how to wait for a reaction from the outside world and only then react. When the little programmer's mother applauds him for a beautifully sung song, he will move back, turn around and drive to the kitchen, where a gift is waiting for his mother. And this is where it starts programming - in response to external events, to "if" and "when" something happens.

Play-i's main goal is to make robots accessible to as many children as possible. The design is designed to suit both boys and girls, and the wheel is hidden to prevent girls from robots saw the ideal toy for their brother and not for themselves - at that age, however, the world is strictly divided into girls and boys. In addition, the company decided that instead of t-shirts and small items with the promotion of robots (with which individuals show respect for such innovations), this time they will collect donations, and the proceeds will be used to bring robots to schools and other organizations.