I was excited to recently find a board game that
claims to teach fundamental programming concepts to very young children. It’s
called Robot Turtles. The feature
that I found most attractive and perhaps unique in the game is that Robot Turtles is designed for adults
to play with kids. Sure, Robot
Turtles could be an APP, but touching and swiping an APP is a solitary
experience.
The idea of a ‘turtle’ as a programmable object
originated with Dr. Seymour Papert in the early 1970s. At that time he was a
researcher working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. You can trace the evolution of Logo from Papert’s original
mainframe LISP version to Apple and Atari Logo in 1980s to Starlogo in the
1990s and to Scratch (http://www.scratch.mit.edu), its latest incarnation.
A grownup is the Turtle Mover and controls the movement
of the game pieces. This keeps the game moving and removes the errors
youngsters might make in counting positions on the board.
Each youngster is a Turtle Master and
controls the action cards.
The goal is for each Turtle Master to use
their set of action cards to get their turtle from the start position to the
colored gem that matches the color of their turtle.
The path between the Start position and the jewel can
be blocked by walls of ice, stone, or even wooden crates. Fortunately, each
turtle can carry a laser to blast through these walls.
Here’s what a typical game board looks like.
Robot Turtles is a great introduction to Scratch Jr
a free
programming language for five to seven year olds.
Robot Turtles sells for around thirty dollars but check Amazon for the latest price.
nice
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