iRobot's New Education Robot Makes Learning to Code a Little More Affordable

Re:iRobot's New Education Robot Makes Learning to Code a Lit... by turnerc on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @09:36PM (#23993420)

Unfortunately I am yet to see evidence of these new "coding robots" actually providing educational benefit, they seem to be more of a distraction from the fundamentals of maths and science, and an even greater burden on an already stretched education system budget.

Perhaps children aged 6 should be focused on reading and writing rather than worrying about Moravec's paradox on a $200 bleeping pile of plastic.

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Re:iRobot's New Education Robot Makes Learning to Code a Lit... by userbinator on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @10:07PM (#23993646)

Perhaps children aged 6 should be focused on reading and writing

...and given a Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum to play with, along with a few volumes of documentation. ;-)

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Re:iRobot's New Education Robot Makes Learning to Code a Lit... by Nexxxeh on Thursday July 30, 2020 @09:36AM (#23997933)

I found its spiritual predecessors, the Turtle and the Roamer, and the programming language LOGO, to be helpful in learning maths and programming at an early age. I then moved to BASIC. Then Pascal, then Delphi.

YMMV, but ask geeks who grew up in the UK during the late eighties and early nineties and see what their opinion is.

Maybe it's less important now that things like Minecraft are so much more immersive than the tools we had "back in the day", but I wouldn't discount it so easily.

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Re:iRobot's New Education Robot Makes Learning to Code a Lit... by kiba on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:17AM (#23995789)

I doubt parents rich enough to afford this are overstretch. It doesn't seems especially useful though.

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