Robots & Code
Tap a card to open it up What Is a Robot? · Sensors · Motors · Loops · If… Then · Bugs · Robot Arms · Rovers · Drones · Robots That Help. A robot only ever does what someone wrote down — which is why writing it down well is the real skill.
Ages 7–10
What's inside
What Is a Robot? — notice, choose, move
A robot is a machine that can notice something around it, choose what to do about it, and then move by itself. Miss out any one of those three and it is a different kind of machine. A toaster is not a robot; a toy that turns away from the edge of a table is getting close.
Sensors — turning the world into numbers
A sensor is a part whose only job is to measure one thing and report it as a number. Bright or dark becomes a number. Near or far becomes a number. Without sensors a robot is stuck guessing, and machines are terrible guessers.
Motors — where decisions become movement
Deciding is useless if nothing happens afterwards, so every robot needs something that pushes back against the world. Motors are that something. Inside one, electricity makes magnets pull and let go, over and over, and a shaft spins.
Loops — write it once, do it lots
Here is a real programming idea, and it is smaller than people think. A loop means: do these steps again. Instead of writing "step forward" ten times, you write it once and put a loop around it saying ten.
If… Then — a question with two paths
The second big idea is even shorter: if something is true, do this. It is how a program stops being a straight line and starts making choices. Every robot that reacts to anything is built out of these.
Bugs — mistakes are part of the job
Nobody writes a program that works first time, and that includes the people who do it for a living. A bug is not the machine breaking; it is the machine faithfully doing the thing you actually wrote instead of the thing you meant. Finding bugs is called debugging, and it is a proper skill, not a punishment.
Robot Arms — the same move, all day
The most common robot in the world is not a walking one — it is an arm bolted to a floor. It usually has about six joints, roughly like your shoulder, elbow and wrist put together. Its talent is not cleverness; it is repeating the same movement thousands of times without drifting a millimetre.
Rovers — driving on another planet
A rover is a robot that drives across a place no human has ever stood. There are several on Mars, and they are the reason we have photographs of a landscape millions of kilometres away. They are also the best example of why a robot has to be able to decide something for itself.
Drones — four propellers, one clever balance
A drone stays up by pushing air downwards with spinning propellers, which sounds simple until you notice it has no way of leaning on anything. It has to correct its balance constantly, dozens of times a second, or it flips. That balancing is done by a program, which makes a drone a flying robot rather than a toy aeroplane.
Robots That Help — dull, dirty or dangerous
The most useful robots are rarely the flashiest ones. They tend to do jobs described as dull, dirty or dangerous: work that repeats forever, work in filthy places, or work where a human would be at risk. Once you know that pattern, you can spot a good robot job in a second.
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