• Question: Why do you think young people should learn about robots?

    Asked by anon-257014 to Tom, Stephen on 15 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Tom Dack

      Tom Dack answered on 15 Jun 2020:

      Robots are everywhere – from the workplace, to science, to hoovering our home! Robots are just another way which coding can be used, as each and every robot will need a set of instructions – its code – in order to do the job its made for.

      Using things such as LEGO Mindstorms to introduce both robotics and coding helps us to communicate how code can be used to write instructions for a computer or robot, and helps young people to see the result their code has.

Comments

  • Photo: Jane

    Jane commented on :

    I think they are really good for learning what skills are needed to write programs, rather than just learning programming languages. Programming is about taking ideas and expressing them as a sequence of instructions that can then be translated into code, having something like a robot you need to direct out a maze or something is a nice simple problem that gets children to think in this way.

    The other reason is simply that robots are exciting, and learning new skills should be fun! It lets you be creative too, as you can program your robot to do whatever you want. People don’t always associate science and creativity, but being a good programmer means being creative too.