Vikas Gupta: Designing Robots that teach kids to code

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About the talk:

Play-i co-founder and CEO Vikas Gupta saw a problem. 9 out of 10 high schools in America do not teach computer programming. And Estonia mandates that 4th graders learn to code.

Initiatives like “hour of code (http://csedweek.org/)” are tackling this issue head on. Similarly, Play-i’s solution is to get kids engaged in creating technology at a younger age.

Armed with research done at Tufts and MIT on childhood learning, Gupta and co-founders Saurabh Gupta (Apple) and Mikal Greaves (Frog Design) began building and testing their own visual programming interface that would engage children as young as 5 years old.

After several iterations, (and a successful crowd funding campaign of $1.4 M), Bo and Yana were born, two programmable interactive robots that look and act a lot like toys, but are specially designed to teach your toddler to program.

Meet Bo and Yana and Xplore

• What is computational thinking and why it’s important to start early.

• the research done at Tufts and MIT on young children’s learning processes and how young children can grasp programming concepts with blocks that contained instructions and sequences

• What Play-i tested to assess both engagement and learning, how testing with kids is different from testing with adults, and how Play-i landed on their final design.

About Vikas Gupta

Gupta founded Jambool that was acquired by Google in August 2010. Gupta joined Google as the Head of Consumer Payments after the acquisition. Prior to founding Jambool, Gupta worked at Amazon.com, where he led the payments and web services groups. Gupta attributes his father as the first entrepreneur he knows and his inspiration to become an entrepreneur himself.

Agenda

6:05 PM Dinner, Craft Beer Tasting, and Conversation

7:05 PM Vikas Gupta

7:25 PM Meet Bo & Yana

7:45 PM Q + A (Tweet #PayPalTechX)

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