iRobotRoot rt0 Coding Robot: Programmable STEM Toy for Kids 6+, Ideal for Creative Play Through Art, Music, & Code, White

Actually it’s pretty fun coding experience, especially if you are already a software developer and want to teach kids) For huge programs there’s also a version for PC, that runs on Chrome via JS BLE Api, it’s pretty awesome too, when web-page can communicate via Bluetooth.

Our 6-year old granddaughter learned to program the bot in one day and dazzled the family on Christmas night with a demonstration of coding for the robot

The set includes color stickers for the R0 which makes no sense because it cannot read color. Only the R1 can. Also, the user interface has many options for the R1 so if you purchased the R0, then you can’t do many of the functions. This left our kids feeling disappointed. A better design would have been to pick your unit and then only the options available to your unit are shown. This unit won’t erase, won’t detect RGB, and isn’t magnetized.

The iRobot Root rt0 Coding Robot is one neat little starter robot. It comes with a foldable segmented white board (each is a little square), a marker to use with the bot, a charging cable, and the robot itself. The robot does not come with a USB to wall outlet adapter but given a lot of things do this was not a problem for us as we could easily just charge it with an existing.Once the robot was charged we were able to install the app easily from the play store. It paired quickly with the phone and immediately allowed us to begin placing some code blocks. The app itself is nice in that it has a sandbox mode on the right for testing your code prior to performing the action if you so desire.The biggest downside so far is just that the app doesn't limit the code based on the robot you have so it shows some rt1 only commands like lowering the eraser and sensing colors. That's not too bad though as it does still have a lot of functionality it just led to some disappointment as my son obviously got excited seeing those options (I had read previously it didn't have those sensors but he was less informed so it was a let down for him).You can do a lot with the app though which makes it great. It allows you to quickly toggle between 3 levels of coding difficulty and it's all drag and drop so it's really just a matter of how much detail you want to go into and the format it's displayed with. For example the move forward command in level 1 it has very specific intervals that you can move with, level 2 on allows much more control over the distance you go. The same for rotations where level 1 is locked to some common ones while the latter two you can do a lot more with.I wish for level 1 they broke out some of the movements a bit more into their own actions. For example the marker down one is also eraser down (this has no eraser) and market up commands. You click it and it lets you toggle which one you want. It seems like it really should just have separate ones for each of those but I think given the eraser would only go down if you lifted the marker I guess they decided to keep them together.One word of caution if you go from level 3 to level 1 with some specific intervals that are not supported you'll get a warning and it will remove those values (IIRC) and use something supported by that level. Not a big deal but I enjoyed showing my son how the level 1 to level 3 changes so it limited us in terms of some of the more complex code we were making (we wrote out a letter A for his name so needed some more specific rotations).I think it's all really cool though. I wish they had had the ability to add more functionality / sensors with upgrades we could buy as it does feel a bit limited in that it's mostly a marker robot as it is now. We'll see if we can find some chalk that's the right size to use with it outside over the next few weeks as it would be cool if we could do that over the whiteboard as it's limited space wise. I'd highly recommend it although hopefully they remove some of these sensors from the app when using the rt0.

This coding robot is an incredible learning tool for young learners; it begins at a basic image level and then advances to the level 3 with written programming steps. At any point, you can change the level as you advance along the learning path or you can choose to play any pre-loaded coding "game". You can also create your own program for your robot to follow (such as a start -> move if x then y). It is very simple for anyone to follow along with after you watch the pre-loaded tutorial videos.This coding robot has so many features, some of which include; many touch areas and different colored lights, 360 degree moving capability, the ability to draw with a dry-erase marker and (supposedly) color recognition and edge detection. I have rated this four stars and mentioned supposedly because although it is listed and there are games that utilize this color recognition, our robot does not interact with other colors even though we used the attached white board stickers. Our robot also does not detect edges as it comes off the white board squares freely. We have tried many times (two different adults) to figure out how to "activate" this feature but it doesn't seem to be working for us. This doesn't prevent us from using the robot with the many other features and learning paths.I am a fan of this coding robot for teaching my son. This year, my son (age 7) has been learning in a remote setting and he loved the coding lessons at school from last year. Since he wanted to continue learning coding, I decided to try this robot. His coding lessons in school have never been hands on like this and we worked through the first levels together and with his younger brother (age 5) who also was able to understand and learn level 1 coding.This is a next-level way to learn coding, beginning at the first stages up until understanding programming language and formatting. The three levels are incredible for moving to a stage where my kids will be able to start coding on their computers. I would definitely recommend this technology; however, I do hope that the color recognition and edge detection work in the future.