The Finch - $100 Robot for Teaching Computer Programming

[mouser]

It's hard for me to imagine a cooler toy to get your child to encourage them to learn how to program.

The Finch is a new robot for computer science education. Its design is the result of a four year study at Carnegie Mellon's CREATE lab. The Finch is made to easily integrate into high school and college CS courses. Institutions piloting the Finch have shown improved retention and year-over-year enrollment growth in their CS1 courses.

The Finch was designed to allow students to write richly interactive programs. On-board features include:

• Light, temperature, and obstacle sensors 
• Accelerometers 
• Motors
• Buzzer 
• Full-color beak LED 
• Pen mount for drawing capability 
• Plugs into USB port - no batteries required 
• The Finch is currently programmable with Java and Python. Additional language support will be released throughout 2011.

http://www.finchrobot.com/

from http://www.boingboing.net/

[Ath]

+1

But why for my kid(s)

[mouser]

for adults too

[Ath]

Oh, and why for learning to program? I already know how to do that (in several ways)

This is just great fun (and quite affordable, too)

Now to find out if and how long it will take to ship to Europe

[Deozaan]

So... It's a robot you can program, hence the encouragement to learn how to program it?

I wonder if it can interact specifically with other Finch robots.

[vixay]

Look's great. I wonder what should be the minimum starting age? 5 is good enough, how about 10?