Teach Kids Coding With This App That Lets Them Turn Your Phone Into … Anything
Yes, your phone. Do you want them to learn to code or not?
Having already taught your kids physics, robotic engineering, and cultural anthropology in the most adorable ways possible, Tinybop has rolled out a new app that teaches kids how to code by manipulating the components of their favorite toy: your phone or tablet.
The Everything Machine follows The Robot Factory in the weird, wonderful studio’s Digital Toys series, which attempts to give the born-online generation the same open-ended platform for building and creating that a bucket of Legos and Tinkertoys once gave you and the analog suckers you grew up with. Using a super simple, drag-and-drop visual programming language, kids can connect and control all of all your phone or tablet’s sensors and tools — camera, microphone, speaker, screen, gyroscope, and light — to create a machine that does everything from play certain songs at specific times to “Catch The Ice Cream Monster”:
[youtube https://youtu.be/unFUQCbvrvI expand=1]
The app can access home routers and electronic logic gates, so friends can communicate or prank each other across devices, and the whole enterprise can scale in complexity as your kid figures it out. To that point, if all of this is utterly lost on you, there’s an extensive PDF manual that’s been translated into 9 languages so concerned parents everywhere can figure out how the hell their kid built a “Rickroll Dad Whenever He Opens His Underwear Drawer” Machine — and how to turn it off.
The Everything Machine: $2.99 (iOs)
Ages: 9-11
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