Well Sophia is not really thrilled about the Mindstorms software.
We installed it on the machine and watched the videos. She liked that. Then, we went to the first programming task for the Shooter Bot. Make the robot go forward and backward five rotations.
The environment is really much more complicated that the controls on the brick, and programming it in that environment shows the problem. On the brick, she had already figured this out and made this program on her own. But when she was doing it in the software environment. It was completely foreign and not intuitive. The movement blocks have a TON of options. It reminds me of other dialogs on visual programming environments that will go nameless (suffice it to say that I was surprised it was missing options to set the sample time and datatype). In any case, she lost patience after the second step, because she had to change two things on the dialog and couldn’t find the two options among the many that were there, and she said in frustration, “I’ll just go do it on the robot OK?!” I had to agree it was easier. I think this programming environment is going to be tough to get the kids into. The first example for the Shooter Bot was completely blah, and I’m wondering if there is another environment that is easier to use. (I thought this used Scratch - which Sophia really likes - I’m shocked it’s this complicated.)