This week, I went to the LearnLunch conference in Boston and one company caught my eyes.
The KIBO project initially was a project at Tufts University, and has received financial supports from the National Science Foundation through SBIR grants.
The first time I saw this product, it reminded me a lot of thing: Constructionism, Papert's Mindstorm, the MIT miedia lab etc. The way they described as creating a developmentally appropriate robotics construction set for young children in Pre-K through 2nd grade sounded familiar to me. Later, I read some of the papers and confirmed my idea. Some of the researchers did have some connections with MIT media lab, or at least knew well in Papert's theory.
The child created a sequence of instructions (a program) using the wooden blocks and KIBO reads the barcodes with an embedded scanner. With the press of a button children watch the robot come alive !
One thing I liked about this project was that it was designed to work without any screentime using wooden programming blocks. And it was low-costing. Really a brilliant idea!
