Wonder workshop cue and learn to code with Blockly

Here is a little neat thing I picked up via this year's CES.Apparently there is a huge movement (which I've kind-of missed) which tries to make coding more accessible. That is a great idea. AI and robotics is everywhere and the skills we need to learn is how to make these technologies work and how to code for our new robot friends and so on.So two things I read about yesterday: A neat toy which seems really great and really good for teaching kids how to code and a framework or kind-of graphical language which makes it easy to learn and understanding what a programming language is and how to make simple software.

Wonder Workshop cue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKRt9LFhs1Acue is the toy robot your kids may want. It is a neat little gadget which you can customize physically and via elaborate software. It can talk to you with several different personalities and you can play games with it as well as teach it new things to do. All the demos I've seen looked amazing.I hope eventually toys like this - triggering coding skills - will become the new 'Lego' of our time. Allowing kids to experiment, get closer to coding skills and enabling them to build cool stuff.https://www.makewonder.com/cue_the_cleverbot

Google Blockly

What is Blockly: in my own words - it is a Google project (open source) which gives you a framework for using visual blocks as a kind-of programming language. In other words it is an easy to learn and purely visual thing which let's you code or understand code more easily. It is not easy to explain :-) but I would really encourage you to try out some Blockly things.I started with Googles Blockly Games. A set of playful missions which you need to solve using Blockly "code". It's fun and really teaches you how ot use the Blockly blocks.https://developers.google.com/blockly/