News article written by Corbett Communications. The statements made or opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Engineers Australia.
Long gone are the days of dolls and board games under the Christmas tree and high time too if we’re true to the times we live in and want to create future engineers of all persuasions. Many tech toys for children are already in the works and offer more than the all-too-common reconfiguration of adult tech.
Technology Will Save Us, an organisation aimed at encouraging learning through inventive games, believes the toy industry - worth around AU$870 million, UK£3.2 billion and US$25 billion - has a long way to go when it comes to adapting to new technology.
"The toy industry is one of the most powerful industries in the world. It shapes and moulds some of the most important early years of people's lives through education, play and new experiences,” founder Bethany Koby told BBC News.
"It's surprising to see that a lot of the toys we see today still don't use technology in a very productive or creative way. Toys should be able to prepare and empower kids, they should help to shape their futures."
In Europe, Danish firm SmartGurlz is encouraging girls aged 6-12 to code by getting them to program a Segway-style vehicle ridden by a doll. Using the SugarCoded app, the Siggy Robot vehicles can be programmed to spin around, zig-zag or zoom along to carry out missions and adventures. Girls have to read maps and find imaginary items on the floor to help characters complete their tasks.
International toy maker Fisher Price also has younger kids coding and teaches critical thinking and problem solving via Code-a-pillar. Children aged three years and up can arrange and re-arrange this toy’s segments, encouraging them in planning and sequencing.
Primo Toys’ Cubetto is a coding toy for children aged three and up that features a wooden robot, a physical programming console, a set of expandable and colourful coding blocks, maps and an activity book. Kids place the blocks in different patterns on the control panel, creating sequences of instructions that program the robot’s movement.
The Netherlands’ company Frog Design has a toy called Yibu that bridges the divide between the real world and digital and involves five wooden toys embedded with sensors. Children learn how temperature, sound, rotation and light direction affect digital characters displayed on a tablet or smartphone by moving the toys around and placing them in different situations. These characters experience environmental challenges and children can help them on their journey.
Google is also collaborating with design company Ideo and Paulo Blikstein from the transformative learning technologies lab at Stanford University on Project Bloks, an open hardware platform designed to help children develop computational thinking in a fun way. Arranging the blocks in a certain sequence allows kids to control a ‘microbot’, making it draw, turn and move however it’s currently being tested and not yet in shops.
Hackaball has a string of awards in its wake since launching a Kickstarter fund less than two years ago. It’s an actual ball, made of rubber and silicone, 10 cm across that can be thrown against walls and floors despite containing hardware inside. Within the ball there are lights of various colours, a motion detector, a loudspeaker and a microphone housed inside in springy silicone that absorbs shocks.
In testing, children used it to invent a game like Pass the Parcel, called Bomb Detector, where the smallest shake would cause the ball to vibrate, forcing that player out of the game. Another group came up with Truth or Dare, based on the colour it turned when it was thrown and caught and one child took a different approach and programmed Hackaball to be an alarm clock that vibrated and made noise.
Toys like Hackaball use a variety of programming languages that include Scratch, now ScratchJr, Blockly, Hopscotch and WeDo. Some languages like WeDo (owned by Lego) are proprietary while others are not but what they all have in common are the elimination of coding syntax like brackets and semi-colons of more conventional languages.
Author: Desi Corbett