Hi!
Today I bring you both another review this time about cubelets from Modular Robotics, and a new concept: emotional robotics.
The review is about cubelets which amazed me after I saw my children playing with them, I have to say I was a bit skeptic at the begining, but keep reading ;-)
The cubelets Six Starter Kit
So cubelets are cube devices and they do different things depending of their functions. There are sensing, logical and action cubelets. Combining them in different ways you both mount and program the robot. And this is the first big difference with other robots that you first design, then you mount it and finally you program it. With further iterations this is the way we usually develop robots.
Cubelets as commented, are developed in a parallel way, which confuses us if we are used to the traditional robotics development way. But for children it's not the same: they wander and play with the cubelets to find different combinations and possibilities. And they find many ways. You can see it in the linked video.
The second important thing is that after seeing my son (3) and daughter (6) with different robots playing, I have to say that my son is more into robots than my daughter. But both play again and again with the cubelets, sometimes playing very intensive, other times in a casual fashion. That's something I saw with previous robots, but with these ones it looks particular intensive, maybe it is because you can freely mount them in many different ways. And each time you mount them different you get a different behaviour, sometimes nothing useful, others something interesting. That discovery part is also very joyful and I think most of us experience it, it's what I call Emotional Robotics: the emotion we experience with robotics.
The last thing is when you know what each cubelet does, then you can think strategically before mounting them, checking later if your thoughts were good or not. I think it also helps them to develop their "science mindset": creating a model in your mind with hypothesis, then testing those hypothesis and correcting if needed until the model matches reality.
They also have a lot of fun, so I think it's a rounded experience. I'm still investigating what else we can do with cubelets, as it looks like you can reprogram them. For a next review I'm thinking about exploiting the possibility of enhance the cubelets with Lego blocks. See a bit in the linked video and if you like it please give it a Like and follow. So what do you think? Please leave your comments below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOrvBuGQEEk