In this Tech Talk report, Time Warner Cable News' Adam Balkin shows you some toys that teach the basics of computer coding in entirely new ways.
It’s an old school looking wooden toy that teaches your child the basic building blocks of computer coding.
Cubetto is one of several toys out this holiday season aimed at sneaking coding skills into play in entirely new ways.
For kids three years old and up, it’s $225 and includes q board and 16 blocks you place in the board , which eventually move Cubetto around a world map - all to help complete stories in books, one of which is included in the starter kit.
“The coding part of it is really writing a physical code with the blocks and they can look at that, they can debug if there’s an error, physically, they don’t have to look at code or any screens or understand language even," says Rob Simpson of PRIMO Toys.
To get those kids to dive a bit deeper into coding though, Parrot is starting to offer drones starting at around $100 that come bundled with the Tynker mobile app so that rather than just flying the drones manually, you can code all sorts of behaviors.
“They can make a Flappy Drone game, yhey can make drones go through hoops, program a flight path," says Shrinivas Mandyam of Tynker.
And Code Gamer for $150 is pretty much what the name implies, as you play the video game you slowly learn what coding is and how to do it.
“As you travel along each level in the video game you encounter these little things called ‘code monsters’ which represent a line of code and it’ll tell you what these lines of code mean and how you would use it in a program that you create," says Lili Desisto of Thames & Kosmos.
Plus, you can take that code away from the game and use it to program the micro-controller that comes with the kit and turn it into anything from a flashlight to an alarm clock.