Awakening of kids to technology with STEM toys, this is the case of Zowi a little intelligent robot which help children to discover how technology works.

Zowi is a project designed by bq who has proposed an evolutionary system developing this intelligent robot for the smaller. The main of bq is bringing Zowi to schools to allow children of ages 8 and up to learn code and programming while playing and put them into the world of technology safely while entertaining. Teaching at the same time that technology can be transparent, proximate and fun.

So, even being a toy it has an educational ecosystem with an extensive pedagogical pathway.

Zowi is an open source smart robot, which means that the physical ecosystem, the code and the app have all been made freely available so that anyone can understand it and modify it.

This friendly robot  already knows how to do a few things when you take it from the box for the first time like walk, dance, dodge obstacles, emit sounds and make mouth gestures. So just pressing the three buttons of the back children can explore the basic functions.

Depending on the age of the child and their pace of learning the tasks can increase their complexity since Zowi adapts and  increase the difficulty progressively.

After play and explore with the firmware of the toy, children can start using the timeline to create easy sequences of movements, gestures and sounds. With this simple task kids can learn about sequential thinking.

Furthermore, in the app children can find different games and projects with theoretical lessons.

Afterwards, children can create and teach Zowi new things and they can do it using Bitbloq. Bitbloq is a simple an intuitive block-programming tool similar to Arduino but specially thought for kids, so it works with simple colour blocks which children can easily reprogram Zowi’s brain.

Children can also create tunes with the buzzer and program it so that it reacts to the sounds they want. In this way kids learn about conditionals and they can program with Bitbloq different functions to specific situations and also solve problems of the daily life.

One of the best things for awakening of kids to technology with STEM toys is that kids can dismantle Zowi to see what it’s like on the inside and add new sensors to be programmed on Bitbloq, allowing children being creators of their own robot.

So, once that children have opened Zowi they will find the controller board, the sensors and the actuator. Using a basic electronic kit they can compare and link Zowi’s components with the components of the kit, learning in this way the basics of electronic and technology.

Later, children can connect again the elements with the controller board and reprogram the new skills of Zowi with Bitbloq.

But you can not just customize your robot from the inside, if you want you can also change the head of Zowi using a 3D printer and at the end, children can share their inventions and projects on a dedicated platform on Zowi’s website.

We found this a very interesting way for awakening of kids to technology with STEM toys. If you are thinking on an implementation of this educational toy you can find additional workshops for families to learn and engage with basic robotic learning.

Artificial Intelligence is making giant strides and it begins to be perceived naturally also in the market of educational toys. If few months ago we talked about more or less static robots, and the discussion that ignited the most careful parents was about the amount of data that a voice assistant could steal from an unwitting child, well today we introduce you to Moxie; in addition to being the latest news in the field of AI for children, it is also proof that design serving artificial intelligence for kids can open new roads for interaction with robots.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know that the ‘child-friendly coding‘ is an hot-topic for us (if you have not read the past articles on the subject, you can retrieve here or here); our attention comes both from the boom of products that have populated the toy market and from the great educational potential of these games. In this article we present Robo Wunderkind, an easy-to-build robot that has just successfully completed a second campaign on Kickstarter.

Dinosaurs have always been one of the favorite topics of children of all times, we have all been fascinated (maybe we still are) and we have owned at least one puppet. To confirm this statement there are also scientific bases that confirm that almost one child in three has an immeasurable interest in this subject. The academics of the University of Virginia have also found that in children interested in dinosaurs there is a higher threshold of attention and greater capacity to process information, mainly because they read a lot about it and try to deepen their knowledge to expand the possibilities of play. Today we present Dino, a dinosaur toy that helps you learn.