The consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, Nevada debuts the latest in technology from ambitious start ups around the world.
One such invention, called Kubo, is a small robot, really no larger than the size of a soda can that can teach children as young as three years old the rudiments of code.
Coding is the process by which commands are written into a computer that tell it what to do. Every application, every website, pretty much all the things technological related around us, require skilled writers of code to make the dream become a reality.
The more we have advanced in recent years, the more demand there has been for coders and programmers in the job market.
Young graduates with a talent for it secure great jobs young and go on to develop fantastic things for the population. A Danish startup, run by Tommy Otzen, is the talent behind Kubo.
Otzen’s vision was two fold: one was his interest in robotics and technology and two to answer a more pressing question: Is code something that should be introduced to children at a Young Age as part of their primary educational curriculum?
Job Market in the coming years
When you visit Kubo’s homepage, a stat flashes across the screen that has plenty of people talking. By the year 2034, 47% of jobs will be automated and disappear from the workforce.
This statistic has a major consequence to the younger generation, namely: How will these young people function when they enter the workforce in a world that is increasingly technological.
From the people at Kubo, the only answer was to develop a robot that could teach children how to code at a very young age. It is common knowledge in the area of language learning that the younger you are the more open you. The phoneme, for example, is a basic building block of human language; a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that comprise language systems.
At a very young age, in the very early years of development, children possess all the phonemes that make up all the languages in the world. So, it makes sense to the inventors of Kubo to introduce the concepts of coding at such a young age, thereby making them better candidates for learning more advanced application later on.
So How Does the Kubo Work?
The Kubo Robot works by obeying the commands laid out in the sequence of tiles the children lay before it. A child simply pieces together the tiles and the
Kubo wheels over it and learns the command respective to how the tiles are laid out. It is built with RFID chips that pick up the commands laid out on the tiles. You can spell words, and if there is a misspelling the Kubo will register it and tell you.
Kubo is available for pre-order
Kubo is still in the crowd funding stage but is creating such a stir many publications in the tech world are talking about it. The company just made it available for pre-order on Indiegogo.
