LAS VEGAS: You've seen apps and toys that promise to teach your child to code. Now enter the robots.
At the CES electronics show in January, coding robots came out in force. One convention hall area was packed with everything from chip-embedded, alphabet-like coding blocks to turtle-like tanks that draw on command.
Of course, no one can really say how well these coding bots teach kids, or even whether learning to code is the essential life skill that so many in the tech industry claim. After all, by the time today's elementary-school kids are entering the workforce, computers may well be programming themselves.
But experts like Jeff Gray, a computer science professor at the University of Alabama and an adviser to the nonprofit coding education group Code.org, say kids can derive other benefits from coding robots and similar toys. They can, for instance, learn ``persistence and grit'' when the toys inevitably do something unintended, he says.
So if you're in the market for a coding robot that teaches and maybe even entertains, here's a look at four that were on display at CES. But beware: None of them are cheap.
At the CES electronics show in January, coding robots came out in force. One convention hall area was packed with everything from chip-embedded, alphabet-like coding blocks to turtle-like tanks that draw on command.
Of course, no one can really say how well these coding bots teach kids, or even whether learning to code is the essential life skill that so many in the tech industry claim. After all, by the time today's elementary-school kids are entering the workforce, computers may well be programming themselves.
But experts like Jeff Gray, a computer science professor at the University of Alabama and an adviser to the nonprofit coding education group Code.org, say kids can derive other benefits from coding robots and similar toys. They can, for instance, learn ``persistence and grit'' when the toys inevitably do something unintended, he says.
So if you're in the market for a coding robot that teaches and maybe even entertains, here's a look at four that were on display at CES. But beware: None of them are cheap.
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