[elocinstr8t]

Well, as long as they're not going to eventually replace the teachers, I think that this is a great idea to teach kids. It's innovative and it will inspire them to actually pay attention to their lesson. It will also allow them to learn the lesson quickly, right?

[erikbe]

I work at Makeblock so I will chime in. We design our robots to be a tool for educators that, as you mention, helps them make classes so much more engaging.

The number of students who will be able to learn, and be interested in learning, to program or to engage with scientific subjects when they see their instructions executed by their own coding companion right in front of them is so much greater than those who will find an IDE exciting. I started programming in QBASIC when I was around 10 but got bored pretty quickly as writing text-based games isn't that exciting, and started playing games instead. I probably could've been a lot better at programming today if I'd had something to keep me engaged.

We have a whitepaper available that is written by an organization that have created their STEM courses around our robots, for those that are interested: https://educators.makeblock.com/whitepaper-how-to-design-ste...

[elocinstr8t]

That's good, because one of the misconceptions when it comes to robots and other automation is that it will take people's jobs away from them. I do believe that there's a middle ground that we can find where robots and humans can work side by side. This (as in education) is one of them. Students tend to get bored easily in class. If you bring this in, they will engage and pay attention more, which seems to me is what your company aims to achieve. Great job on that!

The only problem I can see here is that not all schools will be able to afford this because not every school has a budget for this.