Drawing robot for kids to code
Artie 3000 is an adorable little drawing robot designed to teach children how to code. The simple plastic toy has a small motor and big friendly wheels to convert code into real world patterns on a page.
Getting started with Artie is simple. Once you’ve dropped a marker into the unit and powered it up, the robot creates a local web server that is available in any browser on a computer, phone or tablet. It’s through this web interface you tell Artie where to move and what to draw.
Out of the box, the unit comes with the code to draw a few simple shapes and a maze. There are more templates available on Artie’s website, so children can progress to complex patterns, spelling out their name, or making slight modifications to the code by picking up elements and rearranging them, with a simple drag and drop interface.
If you’ve played with coding platforms aimed at school children, from Swift Playgrounds to Arduino, you’ll be familiar with this drag and drop ‘‘code by blocks’’ interface, although Artie’s is a little more Spartan than most.
Once a child has progressed past these templates, the difficulty curve seems far too steep. Artie supports two advanced code languages – Javascript and Python – neither of which I was prepared to learn for this review. If your child is already interested in either language then Artie would be a fantastic way to explore and develop coding skills; there’s something wonderful in writing code on a display and seeing it move a physical object.
But Artie would be a lot more accessible to a lot more kids if it supported a child friendly language like MIT’s Scratch, and that would open up Artie to the Scratch community of educators who share their projects and code.
Without the support of Scratch, I think many older kids will quickly hit a ceiling with Artie’s code templates, and unless their parents and educators are willing to embrace Python or Javascript, Artie will be abandoned. But for younger kids, from 7-10, Artie should provide many hours of fun. Artie would also make a great introduction lesson in coding for primary school kids.
At around $140 in New Zealand, Artie is more expensive than a barebones Arduino but cheaper than most toys in this category. I was pleased to see the unit can take any Sharpie sized marker, so you won’t need to order a special set of Artie pens once the four in the box are out of ink. To keep the costs down you should invest in a set of rechargeable AA batteries though, as Artie has quite the appetite for power. – Sydney Morning Herald