Getting Started with Robots for kids and children | Hacker News Reader

Getting Started with Robots for kids and children

hanselman.com

48 pointsmountaineer9 comments

The OWI arm takes a couple hours to assemble. A bunch of injection molded parts you have to pop out and snap together, along with a few screws in some places. The motors are just plain DC motors, no feedback or anything like that. My kids love playing with it.

I created a very simple Node API for working with the OWI Robot Arm + USB kit, you can get it from npm or from github.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/owi-robot-arm

https://github.com/bigbang/owi-robot-arm

I also had some fun with a project this summer turning LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kits into connected devices. They can send realtime telemetry to your mobile device, browser or other robots. We have done a couple pilots with them in classrooms as well as taking them to places like Maker Faire and Mozilla Hive events.

http://thegigabots.com/

The Mirobots look really interesting, I definitely will check those out. I can also confirm the Snap Circuits kits are tons of fun, and my kids love playing with them as well.

Gigabots seems really interesting. I find the EV3 programming environment really confusing and would love to see it improved in some way. I don't see a lot of info on Gigabots since summer, is it alive?

The current incarnation of the bots are programmable with JavaScript. We would like to potentially extend them to include some visual programming as well, like MIT Scratch or Blockly. The lack of updates on the site is just a bit of laziness on my part, we have done events with the robots a few times in the last couple of months. If you have an EV3 kit and are interested in trying it out, let me know.

Yes please. First name @ last name .com

My kids have been doing LEGO WeDo robots [1]. They're targeted at a younger audience than the Mindstorms. They're kind of expensive, but both my six year old and my three year old love them!

The big reason I originally targeted WeDo was their programming interface didn't require reading, so both of my kids were programming before they could read :)

[1] -- https://shop.education.lego.com/legoed/en-US/search/navSearc...

I forgot to mention that we also have MOSS robots [1]. These are really fun and great for kids, but I have a couple of warnings on them:

1. We have hardwood floors. When one of these robots falls apart, it is a mess. Handling them requires a bit of care too.

2. I've had some trouble with what I think are bad blocks, but I haven't taken the time to troubleshoot them to make sure.

What I really like about them, though, is that it teaches programming concepts by clicking blocks together. There is also a C api as well that I am planning on playing with.

[1] -- http://www.modrobotics.com/moss/

Another robot for kids is called Riq [1]. It was on HN a few weeks ago [2] and one of the comments has a bunch of links to other robot kits.

[1] http://riq.edventureslab.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748342

Also: http://www.banggood.com/Wholesale-New-6-In-1-Educational-Sol...

Though beware BangGood takes a LONG time to stuff to the US from the China Warehouse.

Missing the Sphero. Limited sensors I do admit, (though the motion sensors are damn good!) but its a ball you can program through macros or code. I really like it.

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