Plenty went wrong so he had a chance to learn that errors and debugging are normal. For instance, first we would make something move, then make it move as we wanted, and only then think about how to make it move only at certain times or how to make things happen onscreen.

I talked my son through building the programs, encouraging him to start with simple steps, checking that they worked, finding out why they didn’t work, and then building upon that step, until he had a whole program. Today, children expect computers to do much more impressive things on a screen. Putting text on the screen and reading text input was new enough to keep my interest. That didn’t allow anything but programming from the moment you turned it on, and the BASIC keywords were just a keyboard press away. It’s the best equivalent I’ve found for my own first programming experiences with BASIC on the Sinclair ZX81 when I was 8 years old. As robotics is not yet pervasive in everyday life, the limited functionality is helpfully simple without seeming unimpressive. Controlling real objects in the real world is interesting enough to small children. It’s a nice simple first step into programming and robotics for kids that aren’t old enough to deal with Lego Mindstorms, which I guess needs a higher level of reading and writing skills. For instance, the program can turn the motor on or off depending on the whether a sensor detects something. It’s a very simple system of sensors and a motor that plug into a computer via a USB hub so the child can write simple programs to control it. Last week my son, who has just turned 6, tried out the Lego Wedo kit that I’ve had sitting in the cupboard until I thought he was ready.

Lego wedo 9580 software