{"id":3376,"date":"2010-03-13T20:45:17","date_gmt":"2010-03-14T01:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=3376"},"modified":"2010-03-13T20:45:17","modified_gmt":"2010-03-14T01:45:17","slug":"story-behind-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=3376","title":{"rendered":"Story behind the story"},"content":{"rendered":"

My post yesterday sort of started in the middle of the conversation. Anyone reading it might be wondering why<\/i> 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<\/a> and others at Georgia Tech University.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So you wouldn’t have to convince kids why<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So that’s the more complete story behind the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Story behind the story”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3377,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions\/3377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}