Christian Guder, Leonhard Oschutz, and Matthias Burger founded Kinematics in 2013 with the goal of bringing robotics and coding education to the world. Instead of just consuming technology, they want children to be able to create the tools to make that technology useful. The group first developed a set of educational robots named Tinkerbots and are back with LOMO, a toy that they hope will teach kids about physical programming, construction and robotics.
The big novelty of LOMO (Logic and Motion) is the fact that programming is done completely without screens. The main robot chassis is controlled from the Programming Board, a long Lego-compatible board that takes commands from a series of light bricks. Children (or their parents) can place the different light bricks on the programming board to send commands to the robot. The black section of the programming board is used for commands like forward, backward, left, right, loop, random, sensor, or negation and the white part of the board can do advanced coding functions IF / ELSE / THEN. Bricks are placed on the programming board, then the start button is pushed and the robot begins to move. Different programming, algorithmic, debugging and recursion concepts can be taught with the LOMO system. The group hopes that creativity will be fostered as users get to build whatever they like onto the robot chassis and teamwork skills can be built as the children play in groups.
LOMO is entering a very crowded market full of tools used to teach kids programming and robotics. I really like the idea of screenless programming concepts, and the idea that the grid built for the robots to wander around combines trial and error with measured quantities of distance and direction. The starter pack comes with turtle pieces for the robot chassis and some expansion packs have a snail, a beaver, or monsters. The campaign page is already full of examples of kids who’ve built other more imaginative and abstract chassis designs around their robots. Their Indiegogo campaign ends on July 5.