Little Robot Friends

The premise Argo took to the TechTO stage in March 2017 was that coding had been declared a core literacy for the 21st century and was about to arrive in K-12 curricula — and that nobody had solved teaching it to a five- or seven-year-old, because telling a child to trust you that it gets fun later does not work. Little Robot Friends answers that by making the robot a character first. A child names it, decides how it should react to being touched, tickled, startled by a loud noise or blinded by a bright light, then builds that behaviour in a drag-and-drop editor. Argo's argument is that children imbue the robot with qualities they either want in themselves or see in other people, which is what keeps them engaged long enough to pick up the electronics and code underneath. The company also sells classroom kits and teaching materials for educators.