BROOKLYN? ??? ?? New York – I’m sitting on the floor at The Academy of Talented Scholars (PS 682) in Bensonhurst, watching kindergarteners create robots on an iPad.

It’s one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen, and I don’t even like children.

The exercise is part of the curriculum led by co-teachers Stacy Butsikares and Allison Bookbinder, focused on helping the 5- and 6-year-old students come up with ways to solve problems.

---

You May Also Like

---

---

The first step is to identify a problem happening in the school. The kindergarteners come up with ideas like kids horsing around in the lunch line, or not throwing trash away properly, or making too much noise at recess. Students are instructed to create a robot that could solve the problem, and draw the robot on a piece of paper.

Once the robot is sketched out, the real fun begins. Using the app The Robot Factory, these pint-sized problem-solvers bring their robot ideas to life.

Kids aren’t throwing trash away? That’s OK, a robot with long, winding arms can pick up the trash with its claw and store it in its stomach. Kids are too loud at recess? A robot with a booming voice can say “Be quiet” as it hovers around the students.

The kids can design their robots to their hearts' content — adding wings, propellers and jetpacks to make them fly, and adding features like a camera (to take photos of interlopers) or voice recordings to make them more fun.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

It’s clear the kids are having fun — and they're learning, too.

The Robot Factory was named Apple’s 2015 iPad App of the Year. It’s from the team at Tinybop, a software development shop based in Brooklyn. Founded in 2013, Tinybop has 11 apps, all aimed at the education market.

Founder and CEO Raul Gutierrez thinks a lot about how kids play and their play patterns. Tinybop’s office in Downtown Brooklyn is replete with classic education posters. It even has a library full of old books from the ’60s and ’70s.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

You get the sense that Gutierrez is trying to re-create some of that educational magic from an earlier, pre-connected time, on the iPad.

Although Tinybop’s apps — with titles like The Human Body (which explores the human body), Plants (a focus on nature) and Simple Machines (physics) — are aimed at education, they aren’t teaching a specific curriculum. Instead, Gutierrez is hoping to create a model that gets kids to create and answer questions.

Which is why The Robot Factory is being used in a kindergarten classroom. Rather than simply using the iPad to do rote memorization of numbers and letters, the kids use the tool to solve a problem. Moreover, the iPad isn’t even the sole focus of the lesson. Before the students could even create their robot, they had to identify and write out the problem and then sketch the solution.

Unlike a lot of apps aimed at kids, Tinybop’s apps are designed for quiet. Gutierrez says that a lot of children’s media “gamifies the experience” with Pavlovian bells and whistles, but he thinks this distracts from the play and learning potential.

Instead, in apps like The Robot Factory, sounds are limited to effects — like the whirring of propellers — or added voice input.

Tinybop’s apps are also developed in a way that encourages exploration, without hand-holding to let kids know what happens.

This was evident watching the kindergarten students play with the app. Faces exploded with glee when they realized they could add a new attachment or make a robot move in a certain way that wasn’t expected.

“It’s okay to slightly disorient kids,” Gutierrez said.

Tinybop’s business model is interesting because all of its apps are paid. When I spoke to Gutierrez last month, he explained that it was important to make content worth paying for.

Apps sell for $3.99 or are available in collections. But Tinybop sees a tremendous amount of sales to educators who (like the teachers at PS 682) use the apps in the classroom.

Mashable Trend Report Decode what’s viral, what’s next, and what it all means. Sign up for Mashable’s weekly Trend Report newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

Teaching the next generation of coders

The iPad is used for older students as well.

At the Berkeley Carroll School in Park Slope, every student in grades 3 through 12 gets an iPad that is integrated into their curriculum.

In the Digital Essentials class, fifth and sixth grade students learn the fundamentals of programming using Hopscotch, a visual programming language that lets kids build apps entirely on the iPhone and iPad.

Watching 11-year-olds build their own versions of Subway Surfers using the iPad and Hopscotch was a riveting experience. The students were building real, functional games and doing it on the iPad.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Hopscotch was launched in 2013 by Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John. It was founded, in part, to help get young girls interested in programming. Leavitt is a former teacher who had an interest in technology; John was one of the only female engineers at her company.

“In talking to a lot of our friends who are a lot of good hackers who all look demographically really similar, we found the same story coming up over and over again," Leavitt said. "They got interested in programming at 11 or 12 because they played video games and wanted to learn to make their own."

The original goal was to build a tool that young girls would want.

Understanding that there are essential building blocks and ideas that are key to all programming languages, the idea for Hopscotch was to be a visual coding language that would allow kids to code apps directly on the iPad.

Similar to MIT Media Labs’ Scratch, the idea behind Hopscotch is that kids can build programs using a visual interface, dragging and dropping blocks rather than having to type out commands.

“The problem with typing code is it's really prone to error,” Leavitt said. “What we’re trying to do is figure out a better interface for programming.”

It turned out that the iPad was the perfect device for Hopscotch because it’s tailor-made for the visual, touch-centric nature of a drag-and-drop programming interface.

And tablets — along with smartphones — are the computers kids interact with the most. Leavitt says that for their product, the iPad is actually betterthan a traditional computer. Not only is it the computer kids use the most, these devices aren’t intimidating in the same way programming on a regular computer could be.

Leavitt says that although schools weren’t the specific target for Hopscotch, it was clear early on that the classroom was a perfect fit for the product.

The Hopscotch team offers up free curriculum to schools and teachers to help them get the most out of the platform. This is in part because most computer science teachers at schools across the United States are not trained with programming. Because of this, Leavitt — a former teacher — felt it was even more important to help offer lessons and curriculum so that instructors could be up to speed too.

On its YouTube channel, Hopscotch posts tutorials for various projects. Check out this video that shows how to re-create Flappy Bird in Hopscotch.

This is the case at Berkeley Carroll, where the class I audited was taught by a teacher who doesn’t have a background in programming but has gone on to successfully teach the Digital Essentials. Still, that didn’t prevent the teacher from actively helping students and teaching the curriculum.

The open-ended nature of Hopscotch — there isn’t just one way to solve a problem — also allows kids (and teachers) with different interests to express themselves through code.

Liza Conrad, who heads up community and partnerships at Hopscotch, says that more since Hopscotch launched in 2013, more than 6 million projects have been published to the platform using only the iPad.

So what happens after kids master Hopscotch? Do they continue coding? Conrad says that the team receives fan mail all the time (something she calls “really gratifying”) from kids who have parlayed their experience with Hopscotch into learning other languages too.

Conrad even said that one of their “most prolific” users who started using Hopscotch at age 12, has now parlayed those skills into a high school programming internship.

For more than just consumption

Educational apps like The Robot Factory and programming languages like Hopscotch go a long way towards dispelling the myth that the iPad is just for consumption.

Although that meme has dissipated quite a bit since the device’s release in 2010, there is still often an idea the device is best-suited for consuming, not creating.

And that’s just not true. Watching kindergarten and middle school students alike use the iPad, it was clear that to these kids this istheir primary computer.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t competition. Google is pushing Chromebooks hard – especially in education.

Still, education has always been a big focus for Apple and its clear that is only going to continue. Many of the big iOS 9.3 features for the iPad were aimed strictly at education.

With iPad sales continuing to stagnate, focusing on education makes a lot of sense. After all, it’s clear the kids love using them in the classroom.