#### This Christmas, give your children the ultimate leg up — a toy that will teach them how to code
Vikas Gupta is showing me his robot, a three-wheeled whirling dervish that vaguely reminds me of Pixar’s Wall-E and sounds like a Teletubbie. Its name is Dash, and there is no escaping its adorability. As Dash motors about the floor of a conference room at the San Mateo offices of Gupta’s startup, Wonder Workshop, bouncing into walls and spinning around, it bleats and coos in tones as cute and irresistible as a baby lamb crossed with a puppy.
In other words, I can see how a kid would like to play with Dash.
But beneath the surface there’s something more interesting going on than mere entertainment with Dash, and its less-mobile partner, Dot, a stripped down robot that works mostly as a remote control for Dash. Together, Dash and Dot have a purpose: Teaching kids how to code. In a world gone digital, they are designed to give children a peek behind the curtains. That bumping and whirling and cooing? You program how it all plays out. And in doing so, you get an early, critical lesson in how the modern world works.
“If we can help kids make sense of the world that they live in,” says Gupta, “then I think they will benefit. Because irrespective of what profession you go into, being able to code will provide valuable skills. How does my iPad work? How do self-driving cars work? If we can’t make sense of the world we live in, we will be nothing more than passive consumers.”
As Gupta talks, Dash plays “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on a xylophone accessory. When I call Dash by name, it quirks its head up at me and utters another captivating burble. My iPad Mini is both a remote control and a programming interface. The possibilities, I realize, are endless.
Just in time for the holiday season, the first production-ready versions of Dash and Dot are shipping out to developers and the thousands of Wonder Workshop backers who contributed to a crowdfunding effort to get the company started. (You can also purchase the robots and their accessories directly from the company’s website.) The prospect makes me feel regret that my kids are already mostly grown up. Because even though the politics of coding education are a little murky — we should probably make sure every kid learns to read and write and multiply before we worry about coding lessons — it’s impossible to miss the point Gupta and Dash are trying to make. Code is everywhere around us, as essential to and determinative of our daily lives as electricity or oxygen. The better we understand this, the better equipped we will be to make our way forward.
When Gupta was a teenager in the North Indian city of Chandigarh in the late 1980s, his high school had only two PCs. As Gupta remembers it, the computers weren’t connected to a network of any kind.
“There were only two things you could do with them, play games or code,” he says.
When he tired of gaming, he started teaching himself BASIC, with a determination so obsessive that his principal soon gave him a key to the school, and told him to come in any time he wanted.
Vikas GuptaAnd when you look at Gupta’s life trajectory, the word “superpower” doesn’t seem all that out of place. Being able to code propelled Gupta down a road leading from Chandigarh to the United States. After a stint at Amazon working on the company’s payment systems, he started his own company, which he then promptly sold to Google. Now he runs another startup, making toy robots. It’s a story that is both typical and amazing. Typical because Silicon Valley is packed with immigrants from all over the world who realized that mastering code was the key to upward mobility. There are Guptas everywhere you look. But also amazing because the resulting concentration of talent and wealth in one relatively small geographic area is breathtaking.
Wonder Workshop, which has so far raised about 9 million dollars and has only 32 employees, enjoys access to hardware and software capabilities that would have seemed like black magic just a generation ago. The closest I got to a robot when I was a kid was watching one shout “Danger” on the TV show “Lost in Space.” But now I’m looking at a world where you could make an argument that not providing your children with programmable robots to play with will be as bad a parenting sin as neglecting dentist appointments.
Gupta’s first child, a daughter named Mili, was born three years ago. Gupta took the opportunity to quit Google in order spend quality time with his infant and figure out what to do next. Thinking about his child’s future turned out to be the necessary inspiration.
“I started thinking about kids a lot,” says Gupta. “I especially wondered what kinds of products or things or toys she would be growing up with. Would they be the best products I could imagine putting in her hands? iPads and iPhones are very easy to use, and it’s very easy to give devices like that to your child, but all I could see her doing with them was watching videos or consuming media. I didn’t see how these devices would help her be more creative.”
Gupta recalls coming across a news story reporting how Estonia had mandated that first graders start learning how to code. That seemed to him like a pretty young age to get into the digital nitty-gritty, so he began immersing himself in the latest research.
“I found that kids as young as preschool, five, six, seven years old, are capable of grasping basic coding concepts,” says Gupta. “But what’s always missing are tools that make those concepts accessible to them, because, given their attention spans and their motor skills, they’re not very comfortable with keyboards and laptops.” He wanted kids to engage with code in a way that didn’t tether them to screens, which he felt hinders their learning. “They need something that is tangible to play with,” he adds.
Screenshots from the apps that allow users to control Dash and DotHere’s the difference between being a parent in Silicon Valley and anywhere else. The rest of us worry about finding affordable after-school daycare options or a job that includes health insurance for the whole family. But in the heart of the tech economy, savvy engineers with access to capital just go ahead and build their own solutions to family concerns.
At the very simplest level of operation, a child can direct Dash’s operations by drawing a line with his or her finger on a tablet. Gupta shows me how to do it on an iPad Mini. I drag my finger in a curve; Dash traverses the floor in a similar curve. As one gets more adept with the basics, the challenges get more complicated. Using a modular programming language developed by Google called Blockly, kids can can start playing with variables and commands that are as simple to use as clicking on a button to add a “move forward” or “turn left” command. Your child will need to be able to read, but it’s hard to imagine a coding interface more basic than this one.
Go forward for X amount of seconds. Turn right when Dash’s touch sensor indicates it has hit an obstruction. Sweep up all the Lego pieces in the playroom. Loop that version of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” so it plays endlessly.
In a particularly inspired design choice, the Dash-and-Dot robot set includes a couple of adapters that allow kids to snap Lego pieces on top of the robots. Suddenly, any Lego creation your child can dream up can be integrated with the robots. Anyone who has struggled with the complexity of a Lego Mindstorms set with a kid too young to be interested in its programming options will appreciate the genius at work. It is much, much simpler to program Dash than a Lego Mindstorms creation. With Dash and Dot you can bring your Lego worlds to life without fuss.
I mention my concerns about the potential elitism of coding for kids to Gupta. Many critics of the technological utopianism that pours out of Silicon Valley bridle at the oft-voiced assumption that all the social problems exacerbated by technology will be solved if we just teach everyone to code. Because if the robots take our jobs, it just doesn’t seem likely that everyone who has been “disrupted” will be able to nab a good computer programming position, if they just happened to have been getting tips on Javascript from kindergarten onwards. And with underfunded school systems struggling to get kids up to speed on basic reading and writing skills, teaching coding may not be the most pressing social priority.
Gupta assures me that he thinks reading and writing and math are essential. He also notes that he doesn’t see his company’s robots as a first step in turning society into a mass of computer programmers. He’s more interested in sparking a sense of awareness, a basic understanding of how things tick.
“The goal is for a child to look at an iPad not purely as a way to get and consume content, but as a way to make this other device — a robot — do phenomenal things. The moment you do that, your appetite for what this device can do hopefully gets whetted and you want to do more. This is the path of curiosity that we want to take kids on. Where that journey takes them is an open question.”
