I recently tried out a new (well new to me) robot Codey Rocky - and yes I am going to tell people it's name is Rocky- for STEM outreach activities. I trialed it at recent Girls in STEAM event at the University of Northampton, UK and along with Red the Nao , it seemed to be positively received. This is a slightly feline looking robot (it is the ears, though a bit hard to see in the image above) produced for the company MakeBlock. Programming it is most easily done through an app on a tablet (see below). It is very Scratch-like and the children seemed to pick up on that quite quickly and started producing their own code, the example below is one example they produced. One group decided to set themselves the challenge of getting Rocky to travel along a line of them and they succeeded. Admittedly the challenge is not very hard, but the interesting point was they both decided as a group what to do and made it happen. Rocky has many programmable features, moves around on ...
Robots and getting computers to work with the physical world is fun; this blog looks at my own personal experimenting and building in this area.