The Clever Monkey

There is a good chance that the Cubetto Kickstarter I backed will also mature sometime around the kid’s 6th birthday this year.

As ecogrrl says, who cares if this is the right thing to do vis–à–vis female STEM and engineering and all that. The girl loves robots with exposed parts that she can command. I mean, the other day she called me up after bedtime to tell me she wants to design a digging robot for the backyard. She already had an idea of the actions such a robot would require, and how to go about telling a robot how to do these actions. (And, of course, my brain went right to how I could retro-fit a Tonka digger with servos and motors to solve this problem. I swear, if I had a budget I could make the best toys.)

Again, this is likely to go over well. Or we are raising an evil genius.

The Cubetto stuff has less hacking potential for me, but is definitely more kid accessible, and game and story oriented. It will be interesting to see if any of this stuff actually scratches the itch she has expressed.

Because, as we all know, scratching itches is what drives the hacker ethos.