Edison 2.0 review. Finally, a robot kids can program that families can afford! It’s an impressively versatile little robot, too!
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I’ve reviewed a few robotics programming toys for kids on this blog, but Edison 2.0 is the first one that I can truly call affordable! Timberdoodle sent us this robot to review; it’s part of their fourth grade curriculum kit. The price point is even more impressive when you consider all the things this little robot can do.
Meet Edison 2.0: An Exciting and Affordable Way to Introduce Kids to Robotics and Coding
Edison 2.0 may be small, but it is a powerful little robot. It has intelligent sensors that react to light, sound, and even TV remote commands. Kids can play with Edison’s line following and obstacle avoiding features right out of the box. My five-year-old finds that aspect of the robot highly entertaining, but my 8, 9, and 11-year-old kids are ready for more.
Teaching Edison new skills is easy thanks to the free Edblocks curriculum. We printed it off, and all three older kids got to work. The curriculum starts off simply, with Edison scanning bar codes and then executing the pre-programmed codes. The kids taught Edison to follow a line, and then my son Johnny drew a custom path for Edison:
Soon they were using the EdBlocks app to program Edison to do all sorts of cool things! Composing songs for Edison to play is a current favorite with my musical kids.
One quick note: we had trouble connecting Edison to my daughter’s laptop, but it connected instantly to the kids’ Kindle Fires.
For now, the kids are content using the drag and drop block visual programming system, but I plan to switch them over to EdPy soon. This text based programming feature teaches kids to use Python. Python is the programming language my computer scientist husband recommends as his top pick if you’re looking for a first programming language to learn.
Do We Recommend Edison as a Way to Introduce Kids to Robotics and Coding?
Yes, we recommend Edison 2.0 as an introduction to robotics and programming for elementary school aged children particularly starting in third or fourth grade. I recommend non-screen-based programming toys for younger children. This is a toy that can grow with your child. My eleven-year-old sixth grader Emma started learning the Python programming language this summer, and there is still plenty that Edison can teach her.
11-year-old Emma and 9-year-old Johnny each wrote their own reviews for Edison.
Emma’s Edison 2.0 Review
Thank you, Timberdoodle, for sending this fantastic educational tool for us to test!
Have you tried using Edison to teach kids robotics and programming? What did you think? Please share in the comments. You can also drop a note on my Facebook page, or tag me on Twitter or Instagram. We would love to see any peg doll fairies you make!
MaryAnne lives is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.
This looks really cool! I think my son would love it! Thanks for sharing about it! Will share your post as well!
I bet your son would teach this robot to do all sorts of cool things. Thanks for sharing!
This looks awesome! Thank you for posting this! How did you get the app to go on their kindles? Did you download it from the company or from the app store. If it is on the app store what is it called? I cannot find it when I search for it.
It’s a website that you access on the kindle, not an app that you download. Go to https://www.edblocksapp.com to launch EdBlocks.
Looks like a cool little robot! I wish A were more interested in Robotics, but she keeps saying explicitly that it’s not something that she wants to spend her time on.
Maybe she’ll be like Mike and start off as a mathematician and then make the switch.
This looks really cool, I”ll have to think about this for one of my kiddos independent study.