Primo: A tangible programming interface for learning

[LukeTim]

Primo

"A tangible programming interface designed to teach programming logic to children aged 3 to 7 without the need for literacy."

 

I came across this yesterday and was struck by what a cool idea it is. Obviously, designed for children, the idea is that you have this control block (shown below) in which you can place basic instructions (represented as colourful blocks) to control a small robot called Cubetto. Red blocks mean go forward, blue means turn left, yellow means turn right, and the special green function block causes the subroutine defined in the green box at the bottom to be executed whenever it is encountered.

 

The red button at the end of the flow tells the control block to "compile" the program and then run it by telling the Cubetto robot what to do.

One of the coolest parts, though, is that it is all Arduino based. Source code will be made openly available, and both the control block and the Cubetto will have the USB programming interface exposed so you can reprogram them however you like. Meaning that once kids have grown a little older and reached their teens they can still tinker and play around with it at a more advanced level.
 

 

 

Website

 

I have nothing to do with this project and don't know any of the members personally... I just found the website/kickstarter campaign (finished and funded Dec 2013) and thought it was really cool so decided to share it here. I don't have any children, but perhaps there's some people here with young kids who they'd like to introduce to programming soon.

[Createinator]

Thanks ~ this looks great!

[Nuluvius]

I like it - so will my kids.