Ask HN: 3 yo loves robots. What robot for 4th bday?
She loves creative play,telling stories, drawing etc.
So something that she can play with without it being active would be huge.
But also something where she can make it do things to build stories around and bring other toys into.
They have loads of transformers, hotwheels, playsets and Lego. She loves vector but can't talk clearly enough but he is her little friend.
Any ideas? Please don't respond if you are going to suggest 'go outside' etc, it's not helpful.
24 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] threadKids are v different. One of mine would get bored quick because they move and it messes up her games.
The other would enjoy. We had a robot that took cards and had sine games on it. Both looked that can't remember it's name though
Check out Lego First Lego League for when they are a little older.
If you're in the US there's a pretty good chance of finding a team local to you [1]. Even if there isn't, creating one is straightforward, although a little pricey [2].
It looks like the FLL Jr. program uses the WeDo 2.0 kits, which look pretty similar to Mindstorms but at a lower cost.
[1] https://www.firstinspires.org/team-event-search
[2] https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/flljr/start-a-team
Bit old for someone that young I think .... Although I'll try her on the boost stuff I bet she would love it actually
I especially went with Boost because I remember debugging minstorms at school and I really didn't want to interupt our play-time with a debugging session :D
Pretty cool tech too. Wish someone would have taken it over.
Looks quite good
So something like that unsupervised is a bit worrying for us.
Super simple and doesn’t have the distractions associated with iPads, etc. My son’s school used it for mapping unit... each team of kids drew a pirate treasure map for the bot to follow.
My parents bought a few sphero bots for my kids when they were young... they are a little too abstract for most kids until about 2nd grade. Now (age 8), he loves the Sphero Ollie.
The Sphero is solid, however I agree w/ your views on it.
We’ve found the best bang for buck is the Photon Robot.
Another option is the Cubetto which is also age appropriate.
Credentials: Owner of (and perform testing on) a 7, 5 and 3yo + littlebird.com.au which sells all of the above.
I chose this, because I like robots as well, we already have Lego, she loved playing with duplo and with help could manage to build a smaller 5+ lego set.
It is not cheap, but you can build several things out of it (I remember a Jhonny 5 style robot, a buldozer/tank(?), a guitar and animatronic cat.
The programming interface is simmilar to Scratch Jr, and she can manage it fairly well (mostly playing with the sampler set included with some of the builds, i.e. when robot-cat is supposed to sing :-)
The builds itself are fairly complicated so you'd be doing most of those.