The United Kingdom's National Coding Week is the 3rd Monday in September.
Petoi's founder Dr. Rongzhong Li shared five tips for would-be coding learners with Education Technology based on his journey in successfully developing and commercializing open source quadruped robots:
- Brush up on your maths skills - “Maths is fundamental for any science and engineering field,” says Dr Li. You’ll find a free course available at learndirect.
- Think like a computer - “Computational thinking is the skill to think like a computer, to perform automation of tedious tasks to boost productivity.” Dr Li advises that children can learn such skills by playing with drag-and-drop programming environment, Scratch, while adults can do the same with MIT App inventor.
- Learn the language - Once drag and drop programming has been learned, says Dr Li, the next step is to learn popular programming languages such as Python and C++, using free platforms such as Code Academy.
- Get into physics - Because not all coding is screen-based. In robotics, for example, people need to understand the physics of robots moving in a three-dimensional fashion. Dr Li recommends building motorised Lego objects to understand the process.
- Make it fun - “Making coding fun and enjoyable will help you to stick at it. Whether you want to program your own robot cat or dog, car or arcade machine, there is something for everyone”.
To celebrate National Coding Week. Petoi is running a 15% off sale on the open source four-legged robot kit Bittle dog on Amazon UK for the week of Sept 19th. You can build robot dog Bittle yourself and work with your child to build it, learn Scratch/C++/Python coding and robotics, have fun interacting with your own robot pet.