My post yesterday sort of started in the middle of the conversation. Anyone reading it might be wondering why I wish there were a self-balancing robot built around an iPhone. The larger story has to do with a long-term effort to teach kids to be interested in programming, by having them program robots. The effort is being spear-headed by Mark Guzdial and others at Georgia Tech University.
The basic approach, which I think is wonderful, is to take programming out of the virtual world and bring it into the real physical world. The people doing it have found that kids are a lot more motivated to program an actual physical little robot — which they can dress up and customize, by the way — than something that only exists on a computer screen.
One problem is that the robots they use are somewhat expensive, and all you can do with them is program them for these projects. I was thinking that the whole effort would gain a lot more traction if the “robot” part of things was an attachment on something like an iPhone. A lot of kids already have either an iPhone or some similar device, and these devices all come with a computer, some form of internet connectivity, a camera, and a pretty impressive little processor.
So you wouldn’t have to convince kids why they would want to get this little machine. You’d just be giving them another way to bond with a gadget that they already think is cool, and that they associate with playing and communicating with their friends.
Except once their iPhone (or Android phone) ss upgraded to a robot, they have a lot more reason to learn how to program, to truly bring it life in interesting ways.
So that’s the more complete story behind the story.