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Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#71

Post by AstroJetson »

mknapper1 wrote: post #45

I’ve been a middle school and high school robotics coach for a number of years. I think VEX robotics makes the best products to teach kids of any age robotics. https://www.vexrobotics.com/ You buy a relatively affordable kit of parts, but then you are free to assemble and program the bit in whatever way imaginable. VEX annually comes out with new games and challenges for your robot to be able to complete. There are t…

I'm a big fan of VEX IQ for elementary and middle school students. Parts are easy to work with, there is a wide variety. Decent array of sensors, and you can program in blocks or Python.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#72

Post by TheCondor »

mknapper1 wrote: post #45

I’ve been a middle school and high school robotics coach for a number of years. I think VEX robotics makes the best products to teach kids of any age robotics. https://www.vexrobotics.com/ You buy a relatively affordable kit of parts, but then you are free to assemble and program the bit in whatever way imaginable. VEX annually comes out with new games and challenges for your robot to be able to complete. There are t…

I second this. Both of my children did this, my daughter started in 4th grade. The kits are deceptive, they look like Legos but you can build some remarkably sophisticated robots. With the more advanced ones you can do some pretty advanced programming too. The collaborative way the competition is run is quite clever too. They have a full spectrum of touch points that makes it fairly accessible and satisfying for the children. The other thing I like more than I thought, they provide a couple good starting points for the children to build off of, for the younger kids they are much more likely to succeed by building off of a working plan rather than cutting from whole cloth.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#74

Post by eimrine »

tarruda wrote: post #63
shiroiushi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly true, unfortunately: proprietary tooling that costs an absolute fortune, and has a UI straight out of the very worst of the 1980s, and only works on very select proprietary platforms, is absolutely the norm with hardware work.

Why is that the case? Are there no good open source alternatives to these tools?

Nobody except gigachad capitalists need that advanced PCB.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#75

Post by astroid »

This isn't quite what you asked for, but as a kid who grew up on Lego Mindstorms I would have loved to have Spintronics back then:

https://upperstory.com/en/spintronics/

This is more about learning about electicity in a tangible physical way, using puzzles to learn -- so it's maybe a level lower than your intent, but it is for kids 8 and up and seems like even adults could learn quite a bit from it.

It's really hard to describe though - I strongly recommend watching the video at that link or at least looking at a picture.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#76

Post by darksaints »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #10

I know that you said you don't want a premade kit and following instructions and this is *close* to that... but I think it might still be a great fit. Mark Rober has a new product where they ship a new robot every 2 months. They give you the basic instructions on how to build/program it but the idea is that you take that knowledge and then expand on it yourself by adding features. My daughter is still a little too yo…

I had a really bad experience with crunchlabs. They silently renew your subscription without any warning, which is really bad form in 2024, and they didn’t have an option for cancelling online, forcing you to call a call center which took over an hour just to get someone on the phone and then they had the gall to try high pressure tactics to get me to not cancel. Left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#77

Post by mgbmtl »

danielheath wrote: post #36
tadbit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NOTE: The IDE works only on Mac or Windows (if you want to code) Boo! hiss

Proprietary tooling that doesn’t work the way you want is unfortunately a great introduction to hardware work :/

The Crunchlabs agent seems to be based off the Arduino Agent, so I'm surprised they don't support Linux.

My teenager never had any issues with using Linux since the age of 10 (old laptop with Firefox and Minecraft), and never used Windows (school uses Chromebooks). Hopefully this works with just a standard editor too, although the Crunchlabs IDE looks nicer for learning.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#78

Post by bunderbunder »

lnsru wrote: post #65

My advice as a parent and electrical engineer. Buy kits. Don’t go to electrical engineering. There is nothing interesting there. Only lots of wasted time. Your son is not interested how to calculate resistor’s value in motor control circuit. Your son needs no frustration with failing printed circuit boards. He needs something spectacular what moves (and is visually appealing) and causes light errors to learn from. My…

The main thing I got out of teaching myself how to do it from scratch is the discovery that there's possibly nothing more frustrating and less satisfying than spending days and weeks designing and building relatively simple electronics projects from scratch and then discovering all the fascinatingly inscrutable ways your designs can completely fail to work.

This isn't to say that there aren't people who love it. But I'd guess that for every one person who does there are 100 people where immediately diving in at such a low level kills all the joy. Maybe compare it to trying to get a 10-year-old into games development by starting them off on z80 assembly language.

Tangentially, my time learning electronics straddled the demise of Radio Shack, and I think that might be part of what made it less fun than I expected. With Radio Shack, if I realized I needed a component I had a decent chance of being able to acquire it that day, probably for less than $1. Now that sourcing components almost always has to be done by mail order, realizing you're out of that one size capacitor stalls your project for a week or two and might involve being willing to pay $10 shipping and handling for a $0.15 part.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#79

Post by jeroenjanssens »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I was going to recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms but is is discontinued. In terms of easy of build and programming these were great. This kit is still available https://education.lego.com/en-us/products/lego-education-spi...

You can probably get these sets second hand. I just revived a bricked one (hah!) myself. Had to use the Lego software to update the firmware for that, which only runs on Windows 7, 8, and 10.

I just got NXT-Python [1] working on macOS via a USB cable. No luck pairing the brick to my MacBook via Bluetooth yet. Nevertheless, I can't wait to get building robots with my kids!

[1] https://ni.srht.site/nxt-python/latest/handbook/overview.htm...

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?

#80

Post by meekaaku »

I have been there and this is what I finally settled to. If he starting from complete newbie (no programming background etc), I would suggest start by learning programming only in well controlled environment. Be it python, MIT scratch (for start) or even Basic. Together with this you can try simulated robotics with something like Roboacademy[1]. It is a simulated robot, that you program with very simple instructions to solve pretty amazing problems.

The reason I say is this. Robotics is at the juncture of programming, electronics and mechanics. Learning robotics from zero is learning all of these 3 simultaneously and in a frustrating way. It is frustrating because, real world stuff breaks/faulty parts, misaligned parts, buggy firmware etc. Suppose you want to give a simple instruction move forward 3 seconds, turn right, move forward 2 seconds, but real world stuff has misaligned wheels, it wont turn exactly 90 degrees, it varies between servors/motors of the same model/make, there is jitter etc etc. So many fine-tuning and adjustments you have to make in the real world, and that takes focus and interest away from the creative fun part.

So my suggestion would be learn programming, learn a bit of electronics with age appropriate kits etc, before combining them to robotics.

[1] https://www.robomindacademy.com

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