Devoxx4kids Material

When living in France, I started to help Devoxx4kids France a little bit. I think it is an amazing idea that will give kids skills that they will definitely needs later.

It also shows them that Facebook on your phone hasn’t appeared by magic. It took a lot of people for hundred of years to discover and master the required technologies.

Now that I live in Montreal, I’ve joined Devoxx4kids Québec. Last time I’ve brought my 3 years old. He played with a LEGO Mindstorm robot he built. I was amazed to see him enjoy it even though Mindstorm are 10+.

Anyway, all this is not the theme of this post :-)

This is a post that will evolve in time where I want to put all the cool learning tools I’ve encountered. And try to comment on them. This is mostly a selfish post that will prevent me from forgetting things. But you might found it useful. So here we go.

First, the official Devoxx4kids material.

Then my personal list (I haven’t tried everything. It’s just a list of cool stuff for me to remember).

Games

• Robot Turtles: A board game teaching young children how to program without having them notice
• The Bugs: Another board game teaching young children how to program without having them notice (note that Magik Square official website seems dead)
• RetroPie: To play old games on a Raspberry Pi
• Minecraft: Building, creating and programming worlds

Robots

• Blue-Bot: A cute mouse that can be programmed directly or from a tablet to follow a path
• Code & Go Robot mouse: Similar to Blue-Bot but comes with tiles and obstacles. The mouse can’t be programmed from a tablet. There are cards to tell the path and it recognizes a cheese at the end. Pretty fun
• mBot: Little robot on wheels that you can program using Scratch. Uses a bit too much batteries and in fact can’t do much
• Ozobot: Little robot that you can program with color markers

Programming

• Greenfoot: To program easily little games in Java
• Scratch: Visual programming games by drag & dropping
• Scratch jr: Same a Scratch but for younger kids
• Code Combat: A nice game where you learn how to code along the levels

Construction

• LEGO Mindstroms: Lego with captors and engines that you can problem using their interface. Quite complex to create models
• LEGO WeDo: Like Mindstorms but simpler and for younger kids. They a quick to build and oriented for science workshops
• LEGO Boost: A bit like WeDo but for home. Boost is long to assemble and then offers many programming possibilities

Computers

• Raspberry Pi: A really powerful mini-computer which boots on Linux and can do electronics
• Arduino: A little micro-controller that can be easily programmed to do many things

Electronics

• littleBits: Really cool bricks to build electronic systems
• Makey Makey: Fun chipset and electrodes to interact with the computer using everyday objects
• MakerBloks: Other really cool bricks to build electronic systems
• Arduino: A full-fledged electronic board to play with
• FreeNove: Multiple electronic kits with straightforward explanations