Plenty of toys on the market promise to provide the next generation of coders and
engineers with the foundation they’ll need to compete in the rapidly-changing job market. But in a sea of coding-for-kids products, an update to Anki’s holiday-shopping darling, Cozmo the robot, offers a chance for young would-be coders to tap into a complex machine capable of advanced feats, like facial recognition.
Since its release last year, the almost-too-cute tread-traveling bot, which was designed to spark an emotional, Wall-E-like connection with people, has become wildly popular, so it represents a well-established platform. It’s also a complex machine, with 1.6 million lines of code running between the robot itself and its companion app. The adorable bot can recognize individual faces, expressions, and imitate human emotions. Its “personality engine” leverages AI to allow it to emulate a human by doing things like losing interest in a specific game after playing it multiple times.
Since Cozmo’s launch, university students and others have been programming it through a software development kit. But to do that, they had to know the common coding language Python. That changed on Monday, when Anki opened up Cozmo’s brain to novice code-writers via a simple visual system based on Scratch, a graphical programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab. They call the new feature Code Lab.
