Robotics in Early Learning - Coding Teaches the Literacy of the 21st Century
KinderLab Robotics, the creator of KIBO, the Screen-free STEAM Robotic Kit, shares key reasons why robotics should be incorporated in early learning classrooms. This first article, Coding Teaches the Literacy of the 21st Century, delves into how young learners, with acquiring coding and sequencing skills, will gather the 21st century skills necessary in today’s society.
Playful STEAM Coding Robot for Young Learners
KIBO is the screen-free robot kit for kids that lets 3+ to 7 year-olds create, design, decorate and bring their own robot to life! KIBO is an easy and fun way to bring robotics and coding to your young learners and spark their interest in STEAM. With KIBO, you can introduce coding and robotics into your early childhood classrooms in a fun and playful way!
Early childhood is a wonderful time to sparks kids’ interest in coding, robotics, and engineering. Young children are curious about the world around them, and today that world includes technology. But how can educators promote positive, creative and educational engagement with technology among our youngest learners?
Integrating robotics and coding into early learning is easier than you may think, with hands-on, SCREEN-FREE tools like KIBO.
We teach children to read and write because it opens new doors for them, gives them new ways to think about the world and offers new ways to express themselves. The same is true for coding. When we learn to code, we learn to think sequentially, to think logically, to solve problems. And most importantly, we gain the ability to create anything we can dream of.
Professor “Dr. Marina Bers”, from Tufts University USA, states, “While developing technological fluency is important for understanding the world of bits and atoms around us, it is just as important to provide children with the vision that technology can also be used to make a better world.” (Bers, 2008)
Dr Bers is also the co-founder and chief scientist at KinderLab Robotics, Inc.
Coding is becoming as fundamental to work, education, and culture as literacy was in earlier centuries. Not every child needs to become a computer programmer, but coding gives children the tools to create and participate in a culture, society, and working world increasingly structured by computers.
Sound Sensor
Eye Sensor
We don’t teach children to write because we want them all to be novelists or journalists; we teach them to write so they can express themselves. In the same way, teaching children to code gives them fluency in a new set of tools for self-expression. Coding with robots shows children that they can create with technology.