Paly-i: Delightful Robots for Kids to Program

What is the best way to teach kids to program? Give them a robot for a pet and let them command it to tell stories. Vikas Gupta, previous head of consumer payments at Google, left to cofound Play-i, a robot toy company aimed to teach kids to program with play. 

Existing products to teach kids coding are designed for older children, or require technical guidance from a parent or teacher. By building an inexpensive teaching tool for all ages, learning now relies on the robots themselves. Working with a team of designers and hackers, including Lego Mindstorms creator Mike Dooley, they launched a campaign to raise $250,000 to manufacture two robots called Bo and Yana to teach high-level programming concepts to children as as young as five.

Bo is a bug-eyed, blue character with wheels, 6 accessories connection points, and 12 sensors to detect its surrounding and other robots. Yana is a storytelling robot equipped with an accelerometer to detect how it is being moved. Available in the summer of 2014, Bo will cost $149 and Jana for $49. 
We also recommend watching: "Romo: An iPhone with Personality to Teach Kids Programming" and "Nao: Your Next Household RoboToy".

Paly-i: Robot Toys for Kids to Program

Vikas Gupta is an Indian American internet entrepreneur who founded Jambool, acquired by Google in August 2010. Gupta joined Google as the Head of Consumer Payments after the acquisition. Prior to founding Jambool, Gupta worked at Amazon.com, where he led the payments and web services groups.