From Lego Mindstorms to Botley to Codeapillar, there are some pretty amazing coding robots out on the market right now. It takes something special for a new coding robot to stand out, but I think New Zealand’s own Kai’s Education does just that. I recently got the opportunity to sit down with Bruce and Ronel, the creators of the world’s first hybrid coding robot. Here’s what they said.
Why did you create the KaiBot?
Bruce: I just like hacking stuff. My son was going to school and he was rolling a ball around with his thumbs… and this was coding, apparently, to the teacher. And I’m like… this is miles away from coding. I just got so frustrated… this is not it. I’m like, “Guys, you know, you are doing a disservice to these kids.” I was just so passionate about it and I just got started in it and I said I want more.
And then I looked at all the products on the market and they were all consumer products that had been turned into educational products. [They weren’t] designed for education.
I just love getting kids into coding and I love seeing their brains light up. So I develop robots as a hobby, which is now coming into a full-time business.
What is your approach to teaching kids to code?
B: It’s all about that step ladder approach of getting [kids] on the first rung of the ladder, having some fun, having a good engagement level, and slowly getting them up that ladder and then getting them onto block-based coding and into text-based coding as well.
We wanted to create a resource [where] there is something for every level. There’s so much that you can do. Lasers don’t hurt.
So Kaibot is physical and screen-free, but it can also be virtual and hybrid. It can be a little bit of everything. We like to say it’s the world’s first hybrid robot. So yeah, we just won a top EdTech Products of the Year award for the US.
Level 1: Cards
B: We’ve got a deck of these cards that you can download and print and use with kids. These cards are from basic to very advanced as well, and they’re based on Python, text-based coding.
Ronel: We’ve got the normal start and end, but what we wanted to do was create brackets, variables, if statements, loops… so the kids can start to learn how to actually put code together.
Level 2: The KaiBot
R: What is really cool is each card is a bit like a barcode when you go shopping. You can go and scan the cards and then the robot will play back what you’ve just scanned. You don’t need a screen… you can just do this with robots, tiles and cards and have a lot of fun.
B: We’ve also got these magnetic tiles. You can build in challenges… so you might have a simple thing that goes around the table, or you can make complicated shapes and then say, “Okay, how do we code our way through this challenge?”
Using these magnetic tiles allows you to really scale up. Say you’re [reading] the Gruffalo book. [You could] say, “Okay, how does a mouse go to the Gruffalo?” Then you can have little pictures on the ends of these tiles to teach literacy with it.
The feedback we got from teachers is that kids do the coding, but then they make a mistake and they don’t know how to debug. Say, for instance, the kids forget to end a loop. So we’re going to start the program… now it tells me “bug alert: Loop end missing”. It’s a really good tool for them to say, “Oh, okay, that’s what I’ve done wrong, and that’s what I need to fix.”
➝ Enter for your chance to win a free KaiBot!
Level 3: Hybrid Online
R: The next step would be that you can actually pair your robot to Kainundrum, which is our virtual world. So this is where Kai’s education is really strong, with Kai’s Clan and with KaiBot we’ve got these physical tiles or mats, and then we blend that with a virtual world. So when you see these tiles, it now becomes sort of a maze that is in your virtual world, and you can go and do all sorts of things.
Level 4: Fully Online
B: So with our online platform you can also play independently from the full robot, that’s kainundrum.com. It’s available for free to play and it’s multiplayer, so you can play with up to six friends. [It’s got] maze challenges and all sorts of things.
R: It’s also a game builder, so what we mean by that is you can go and design your own maze or your own escape room. And then you can go and add some lasers and some gates and some pickup balloons and just have a lot of fun actually in the virtual world. So you can have Picasso and paint whatever colors you’ve just created. There are leaderboards, there are weekly challenges, so there’s a lot of stuff that you can just do for free on Kainundrum.
We’ve got lesson plans and activities with… different grades from beginner to intermediate to expert. We’ve got teachers writing lessons for us.
How are you working with teachers to develop the KaiBot?
B: When we are testing this in the classroom, it’s the teachers that come up with those ideas [incorporating social and emotional learning and literacy] and go, “Hey, you know, can I use this for storytelling? Can I use this for maths?” The teachers are the ones that come up with those concepts and we go, “Okay, yeah. Put together a lesson and we’ll incorporate it” because we’ve got a method of sharing lessons publicly.
R: And that’s actually one of the things that we love is teachers can go and create their own projects and they can upload it to the site.
B: Well, I tell you what, this product wouldn’t be anything without the feedback that we get from teachers, you know? I come along with the hardware or come along with the engineering ideas and say, “Look, this is what we can achieve. These are the possibilities in this timeframe.” And then we put a prototype together and go out to a classroom, and then the kids go, “Nah. This is how we gonna use it.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.”
R: But I think the other thing we heard from teachers was that they would have this robot and then the kids would use it for two weeks and then they’re bored. So we wanted to create something that there’s enough to actually keep them busy. We’ve actually got a school here in New Zealand that’s just using [our products] all year because there is so much. We’ve got over a hundred lessons with five different mats, you know, and that’s what they use.
How does Kai’s Education engage children in interdisciplinary ways?
R: With our other robot, Kai’s Clan, we blend the physical robots and AR/VR Adventure mats with virtual worlds. Here we have a Mars map, a warehouse map, and a smart city map. Well, Mars, you know, every school teaches about Mars and planets, it’s science. And then we’ve got some sensors so we can do plant watering. We found that it was a really easy crossover in cross-curricular, and the teachers really like that.
And we also did what I thought was a really cool thing. A lot of the coding robots would say, “Okay, well let’s teach them a loop.” And they just sort of focus on what is a loop. What we were trying to do is like, okay, well let’s tell a story and then incorporate a loop in it. “The penguin got lost in the iceberg and has to find its way back,” so how would you do that? We really wanted to focus more on the fun and engaging ways, because if we can engage a kid, they will have fun.
If you guys could wave a magic wand and get kids to understand one thing about coding or this profession, what would it be?
R: Okay. If I had a magic wand, from a very, very early age, teach kids how to read an Excel spreadsheet and understand data. Data is everywhere around us. No matter what career you do, or what future careers are gonna come up, you need to be able to understand data. I think it will open up a lot of careers.
B: I think we are in a very difficult era of time at the moment with kids being totally immersed in computers and computer games. [My] magic wand was if we had an automatic way of getting them off computers a bit more and getting them into the playground. Yes, I love computers, don’t get me wrong. I was the one stuck on the computer all the time. Just to get a bit more play time in the playground would be great. And social skills, right?
Salt & Lightspeed: Well, it’s not something different. You know, it’s not either you’re increasing your coding skills or you are on the playground. Creative play happens in the real world. Engineers solve problems in the real world. Sometimes we sandbox ourselves (no pun intended!) and don’t let kids see real-world issues. You can take these coding cards out into the playground and code your friend to walk around and go down the slide and all sorts of things.
B: I love the way you think and, and think about it like outside the box, it’s really cool. Like to think about using the cards and you know, in a playground sense, something I would’ve never thought about.
Conclusion
So if you’re looking to purchase a coding robot and are overwhelmed by the possibilities, consider this parent-created, teacher-driven robot that will grow with your child as they learn more and more about coding. If you want to give it a try, download their cards, enter for a chance to win the KaiBot, or jump on Kainundrum to check it out! If you’re a teacher, check out Kai’s Clan here.