Hello : I want to buy my niece a robot kit. She is starting Grade 10 and is taking a robotics option where they will code in C++ and have robots playing soccer. I would like to buy her a kit to play/work with. I am considering Makeblock MBot or the Sparki from Makeshed. She is good in math and science but has no other experience in robotics. Her parents will not be great at support, I live one time zone away. I have made a few simple Arduino projects, but never robots. I figure if she loses interest/ grows out of it, I would happily take it over. Heck maybe I should get one anyhow and support via e mail or Skype. My guess is that before long she will be supporting me.
I like the idea of Makeblock’s expansion/ customization ability. However there is some value in having the robot “work” right out of the box. Anyhow, if you guys have any thoughts or better ideas, please let me know. Thanks
Please note that at this time we currently recommend the 2.4G Version over the Bluetooth version since there is a known issue with Bluetooth connections. The manufacturer is aware of this and working on fixing it but this may take some time.
Thanks. I have seen a couple of poor reviews of mBot, not working, difficult to assemble. As I am far away, it would be difficult to support her. School starts Monday for her, she will find out what platform they use in their school and go from there. I am now thinking the Sparki from Arcbotics maybe a better option. What I don’t want to have happen is problem followed by problem followed by put the bot in a box and say thanks uncle.
I do like the website you guys have and good support, thanks
John
We recommend that you read the detailed review one of our customer left concerning the mBot. It may help you determine if this is the right product for your niece.
Please do not hesitate to contact us again if you have any other questions.
For the ArcBotics Sparki, we make all the lessons and programming software publicly available so you can see exactly what kind of documentation is available for your niece before purchasing. We want students to have the opportunity to teach themselves, so we have step-by-step tutorials separated into Easy, Medium, and Hard, and across topics like Coding, Robotics, each of the electronic parts on Sparki, etc.
Sparki’s software and hardware are open source, and it’s Arduino-based too, so your niece could customize a lot of projects from the platform. Most of the projects posted online by Sparki students and educators have gone above and beyond our existing tutorials, and done some really neat things like programming Sparki to sort a whole area by color or turning Sparki into a telepresence robot. You can see some of our community’s projects on Youtube here: [font=proxima-nova, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif][size=2]bit.ly/29UdAT8[/size][/font]
