Posts tagged: The Robot Factory

The future is here! We don’t have self-driving cars...yet, but we do have robot stickers. Here's what they're all about.

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We adapted a classroom activity developed at The Academy of Talented Scholars (PS 682), in Brooklyn, so your kids can build robots and solve all your problems at home.

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The Robot Factory is now available for Apple TV. Build your robots on your iPad or iPhone. Test them on the Apple TV!

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While every Explorer’s Library app is accompanied by a handbook designed to help adults support kids’ learning, we felt it was appropriate to make something for kids first and adults second for the first app in our Digital Toys series, The Robot Factory. The result is The Robot Factory Technical Manual.

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We’ve doubled the number of parts (100 in total!) to build with and test in The Robot Factory.

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Where are the robots? By now, they were supposed to be everywhere: cleaning our homes, replacing our pets, and saving our lives. The optimistic 50s futurist would be terribly let down by today’s robots. The year 2001 passed without any deep space travel, never mind HAL, and it’s nearly 2019 and we’re far from developing Blade Runner’s replicants. Sure, Curiosity is up finding nitrates on Mars, and there are some pretty sophisticated military robots in the works.

But the robots we’ve got in our homes are a lot simpler than we expected. While I was researching robots for Tinybop’s new app, The Robot Factory, one thing became increasingly clear: we’ve got Big Hero dreams and we live in a Roomba world.

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For every Tinybop app, we work with a different artist to create original illustrations. For our newest app, The Robot Factory, we had the great pleasure of working with Owen Davey. His visual work is playful and elegant — a combination that appeals to adults and kids alike. Needless to say, we were quickly smitten.

Owen’s created kids’ books about an astronaut dog and imagined bedtime adventures. He illustrates the crazy addictive game TwoDots. Somehow he also manages to find time to play guitar in a band and…answer a few questions from us!

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The Robot Factory is now on the App Store! We’re super excited to have this app out in the world for kids to play. In The Robot Factory, kids can build, test, and collect all the robots they can dream up.

The Robot Factory is the first in our second series of apps, Digital Toys. While we’ve already released three apps in the Explorer’s Library (and have a new one coming out mid-May!), Digital Toys has long been in the works. Here are some notes from our adventures in bringing it to life.

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We love robots at Tinybop and know kids do, too. If you ask kids about robots they will sometimes refer to them as both friendly and scary (and sometimes in the same sentence!). Robots are vehicles for kids’ imaginations. Many kids see robots as versions of themselves. Researchers have even concluded that kids’ feelings about robots can inspire learning.

In our exploration of the subject we found hundreds of existing robot apps, but in playing these apps with kids we couldn’t find any that allowed kids to do the two things they really wanted to do: to build their own unique robots and bring them to life. Kids wanted to put arms and legs and heads wherever they wanted, in mad configurations. A kid’s robot might have a dozen arms, two tentacles, and an eyeball. Kids wanted these weirdly configured robots to walk or fly or jump. It turns out that accomplishing these tasks in an app is a meaty and fun problem to untangle.

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We gathered over a dozen kids at the Tinybop office one Saturday and had them play our app, The Robot Factory. In the app, kids can build thousands of robots from an assortment of parts, from exoskeletons to spider legs.

After they played with the app, we asked them to tell us about the robots they created. We expected to hear about their robots’ parts, their colors, and if they were kind or mean, but we ended up hearing stories far more detailed, colorful, and imaginative than that.

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