People have been connecting smartphones with robots for years and in early 2010 some Googlers started to get involved in their 20% time. We first demoed robots from the
Cellbots.com community in the
Google booth at ISEF 2010 in May. It was amazing to watch how engaged the kids were with understanding how the robots worked and what technology was used for the Android phones to talk to them (hint:
it’s Bluetooth, WiFi and Google Chat).
In July we let students from the
CAPE Program take them for a spin and the kids swarmed around the robots while making up games for them. We also took some Cellbots on tour to
Stanford Engineering’s 11th Annual eDay with a table of robots for everyone to play with.
Today we’re proud to have released some great enhancements to App Inventor for Android and open-sourced some Java and Python apps that further this concept, which you can read about
on the Google Code blog. We encourage students everywhere to explore this technology and for educators to build curriculum around these fun learning tools for all ages.
Posted by Ryan Hickman, Engineering Project Manager
