Teaching Programming Logic to the Ultimate Beginners: Children

Arduino Education Home Robotics
Teaching Programming Logic to the Ultimate Beginners: Children

How do you teach programming to children with no prior programming experience? That’s what we tried to figure out at primo.io.

primo.io is a London-based educational hardware company founded by me and Matteo Loglio. Earlier this year we began working on Primo along with product engineer Josh Valman, and mechatronics engineer Lucia Rabago-Mayer. We set off to design a product that would introduce children aged 4 to 7 to programming logic through the magic of play. No screens, no visible technology.

While Primo isn’t the first product to tackle the topic of children and programming, we wanted to do so by crafting a physical experience for the youngest audience possible. We were greatly inspired by the work of Saymour Papert which led to the groundbreaking development of LOGO and physical LOGO’s of the past century. We wanted to distill and simplify this even further, giving it an application suitable for little ones.

d012efb95054f2296c18d37bbcdddc1f_large

Digital products are commonplace when entertaining children, and many noteworthy on-screen solutions already do this well. Scratch, for example, is a fantastic on-screen tool that serves its purpose well, but it’s still fairly complicated and for slightly older children.

In some ways, digital solutions are also the easy choice in today’s educational environments. We entertain our children with digital products all the time. It’s the norm. We chose a different path with a physical product, even though this would mean designing the experience of a programming interface from the ground-up instead of relying on a pre-existing tool (Computers, tablets, and smart-phones). It required some thought, but the benefit of a blank slate is that we could design an experience that was tailored to children as opposed to adopting a vessel originally designed for adults.

After consulting teachers and child psychologists, we began to frame our system into an intuitive play set that required no previous experience, no literacy, and no assistance for the user. What we came up with can be described as a playful physical programming interface children can use to create simple algorithms with colorful blocks. The aim is to guide a friendly robot to its destination by choosing the correct sequence of instructions (forward, left or right)

a5222c8e2be976f681a3d4a1f494b27d_large

The development of Primo happened in a collaborative “open source” environment. The process was not only great and stimulating, but it organically pushed the product from a concept to something that could be commercially viable, easy enough to produce in scale and distributed to schools and homes.

We used what we are privileged to consider “common place” prototyping tools made available from FAB LAB Torino to flesh out each iteration. The final look and feel of the product reflects this a lot, not only in its laser cut-aesthetics, but in the ability   for anyone to pick up our source files (which will be freely available after our Kickstarter campaign) an Arduino board, simple electronics, a bit of creativity, and fashion their own version of the product. Such is the intention behind our decision to keep primo as a open source product.

Keeping our hardware and software open source was a no brainer. We know the topic of programming and early learning is one worth pursuing, and it isn’t just us who think so. By staying open source, we hope to involve those who are interested in the development of this topic rather than having them work against or in competition with us.

We have decided to further our work with Primo through a Kickstarter campaign. We hope that going the crowdfunding route will kill two birds with one stone: Soliciting an interested crowd of technologists and educators who we hope will step up to push our agenda and pitch in on future developments and raising the necessary finances to move our work along to the next level.

20f3083d1d34e6d1a37b42213b9d003d_large

d985207f3a476b1f4fcfbb132e84f384_large

6c70532e700f470c42134a4c5dfc1c80_large

4 thoughts on “Teaching Programming Logic to the Ultimate Beginners: Children

  1. Pinched Nerve says:

    That’s interesing.I want to play,too,even I am an adult.

  2. investing says:

    Does your website have a contact page? I’m having trouble locating it but, I’d like to shoot you an e-mail.
    I’ve got some creative ideas for your blog you might be interested in hearing.
    Either way, great website and I look forward to seeing it expand over time.

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK