Ever tried to sit down in front of a computer with a 3 year old to teach them programming? Sounds ridiculous, right? I can see the mess of Cheerios in the keyboard now. But what if you had a game that would not only give your family hours of fun, but also teach your child to code without them even knowing?
'Robot Turtles' is a board game created by father and entrepreneur Dan Shapiro for kids ages 3 - 8 to learn the fundamentals of computer programming without even needing a computer. And what's more, they don't even need to know how to read to play.
The beauty of the game is that only one person, the 'Turtle Mover', needs to read the rules to play. This means the kids can get right to what they do best. Playing.
So how does it work? After each child, or 'Turtle Master', picks their favorite turtle character, the adult, or 'Turtle Mover', makes a maze on the board with a jewel at the end. The children then need to find their way through the maze by playing a series of instructional cards. The object of the game, of course, is to make it through the maze to get the jewel.
The game allows the children to learn the basics of skills such as order of operations, planning a program, debugging, and much more. There are even 'unlockables' for when the basic game becomes too, well, basic, allowing the game to grow as they do.
Shaprio is now on Kickstarter to raise funding to produce a minimum run of 'Robot Turtles' - he now has over 2,000 pledging over $100,000 to help make this a reality! Currently the game is being offered to backers for a special price of $29 and is due to ship in December,
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