STEM STEAM! STEM STEAM! Yea!
Those are the buzzwords to sell toys today. What Botley is, is a form of R/C car. While kids are used to immediate left/right forward/back control, Botley just takes those in "batch" form and then performs the left/right/forward back.
Your child will not learn anything about coding here (despite "coding cards") as the interface is too primitive. The "coding necessities" were overlooked when it was designed where more emphasis was on the "cute sounds", "look" and marketing of this being something to improve STEM skills.
The good: nice color schemes, powers down automatically, good on batteries, no LCD/LED based video screen. It may help a child's memory in remembering how many forwards or left turns if they don't use the coding cards.
The bad: There is no coding or STEM education here. The "car" named botley will drive forward, left, right and back by issuing commands just like an R/C car but delayed. There is a "loop" feature but it is primitive. There is no method to increment/decrement a a counter for the loop or loop "until", like loop "until object detected". Child can "bracket" a set of L/R/F/B commands with a Loop and end it with loop, pressing loop the number of times the child wants it to loop. That's not really programming or allowing any autonomy one would expect of a robot. Similary, the "if/then" is very primitive, it only works with the "object detection". There is no if/then/else and no "bracketing", or ability to use more than one. You can do something like "Fwd, Fwd, Fwd, If object detect Rev once. That's it. There is no method to do:
Fwd,
Fwd,
Fwd,
if object detect
turn left
end if
Fwd
right
fwd.
There's no method to indicate the end of your "if" or do anything which would allow the "robot" to behave like a robot, for instance travel autonomously and then do something like turn if it sees an object.
You cannot
Loop until object detect
fwd
fwd
right
right
fwd
fwd
End loop
You can't have it run continuously and take action based on an object. So a lot on the looks/cute responses and then they ran out of time to actually design a programming remote (with a 0-9 keys) and END IF, ELSE and LOOPCOUNT buttons. Would have made a great product.
What you end up doing is putting a ball in a fixed spot and a circle in a fixed spot and then use the controller to move Botley to move two squares forward to ball then tell it to turn and take two steps to push ball into the circle.
If you call that programming then great, you will love Botley. You can buy a $20 R/C car and do the same thing though and the car will respond immediately to your commands and therefore your create/debug-test loop is going to have a lot faster feedback.
7th and 8th graders (maybe younger?) can program in BASIC (with variables and if/then/else, and loops etc). That might be a better way to teach actual coding and promote STEM skills in your child.
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