On Saturday, May 5, 18 eight to twelve year olds crowded into the downstairs meeting room of the Picton Branch Library to meet Myke from Mimetics Digital Education and his Jade robots. The afternoon was an opportunity for kids to do something they may have never done before: learn to code a robot.
The Jade robots are very simple robots, coded through a simple interface on a laptop called a Chromebook. In this program, kids were completely hands-on, each one given their own device to play around with. They learned how to use scratch programming, which is a very basic programming language, easy for kids to understand as they get their first taste of coding. They also learned about some basic concepts of robotics and aspects of the Jade robot itself, such as spatial awareness, an important feature of the robot to ensures it doesn’t run into walls or get stuck in corners.
After teaching the kids some basics, Myke set the kids free to try out the coding for themselves. He challenged them to figure out how to make their robots do specific things and gave the kids time to tinker and figure things out on their own. The kids had a great time, and a few may have even discovered a new passion.
