Kibo Robo

Being Robots

Tactile Play Guided Experience

2016, Melbourne, Australia

We were overwhelmed, but not surprised by the amount of kids that wanted to join our Kibo Robo workshops. In this workshop, we were all about teaching kids a different way to learn how to do basic coding, and most importantly how to think, plan out a solution and then solve a problem as a team.

The idea of sitting in front of a computer to learn how to code?! Please no! Yawn! Play is a big part of how kids learn, and it shouldn’t be any different even if it's learning about coding. We want to encourage kids to play with the concepts of coding, by physically coding with scanners, small blocks, chalks and boxes. To put kids in the shoe of a robot, we got creative by encouraging dressing up as robots and even decorating Kibo before programming it.

In this workshop, kids learnt really quickly how easy, basic coding is. That it sounds just like the way we talk, except a lot more formal! They learnt commands such as Begin, Forward, Turn Around, Dance, Sing, Repeat etc and then of course End.

The most laughs they had was when all the kids decided to joined up each of their own Kibo Robo creations and made a monster robot that moved and dance. Hearing the kids laughter and claps made us all giggle and chuckle, like we just discovered leftover chocolate.

We wanted kids to understand that coders are like storytellers. Together we created a scene with cardboard boxes and chalks, and the children got together to think of a solution that then got transfer into code, which ultimately was the story of how Kibo solved a problem.