Photo: Kelvin Ma

My Little Robot

Young children see technology in action every day, says Marina Umaschi Bers, a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. To clue them in to how it all works, Bers spent years collaborating with Tufts students on a small prototype robot that children aged four to seven could program themselves. Then she teamed up with an engineer, Mitch Rosenberg, to form KinderLab Robotics, which manufactures a kit based on that prototype.

The KIBO robot, available for pre-order, features small wooden blocks, each with a bar code for a specific command: begin, end, move right, move left, shake, repeat. Kids arrange the blocks in different sequences, then run a scanner over the bar codes. A handclap starts the program; a voice command stops it.