Dive Brief:

• Southern California startup Evollve wants to introduce young students to the concept of coding a sequence of commands using its robots, Ozobot.
• The company eventually wants the tech powering the $50 robots to work with a number of programming languages, and a new version to be released this year is set to incorporate Google's Blockly to allow users to code commands.
• While the robots are primarily designed for fun and games using the included apps and other software, Evollve sees an opportunity to address the current push for coding education in a fun way.

Dive Insight:

For young students especially, coding can probably be a little intimidating at first. Using robots, for example, as a fun entryway can be beneficial for schools wanting to produce students who are ready to hit the ground running when they get to higher grades — and that's not to say similar approaches aren't helpful to older students who might feel overwhelmed, either.

While this isn't meant to help students become fluent in C++ or Python, for some of them, seeing a tangible visual outcome for the commands they've entered may make the initial concepts easier to digest. And that makes a tool like Ozobot worth considering.