What 90 minutes of unstructured free play with robot dogs taught us about kids and robotics
Two weeks ago we brought Bittle X, Bittle X+Arm, and Nybble Q to the Robot Zoo + Science Slam at Tinker Coop, a community makerspace in Berkeley. Kiddies who had never touched these robots before controlled them via mobile app and micro:bit controller.
No lesson plan. No structured activity. Just free play.
Within 60 seconds they'd invented interactions we never designed for — riding robots on other robots, triggering backflips, watching a robot self-right after being knocked over. The stress testing was relentless. Every robot survived.
What struck me: the kids who engaged most deeply weren't necessarily the ones with prior coding experience. They were the ones who weren't afraid to try something that might break.
The robots run on OpenCat — open-source, programmable via Python, C++, or block-based coding. Source: github.com/PetoiCamp/OpenCat
Has anyone here used quadruped robots in a classroom or informal learning setting? Curious what structured vs unstructured approaches worked best.