Your kid never want to miss a "Play-i" mate

What all your kids perform? Does she/he sing songs, tell stories, recite poems, draw with imagination? Your kid might have a lot of gifts and abilities to do. According to Vikas Gupta, founder and CEO of Play-i, these skills are all a child needs to program and operate a robot. 

Gupta, who left his job as a senior manager at Amazon to begin the company, said he got the idea to build robots for kids after seeing some MIT research about how kids as young as five are able to grasp the concepts of programming. "Kids are great at sequences, just not abstract sequences. Since programming tends to be an abstract concept, you have to make it tangible. For kids, robots make it tangible," said Gupta. 

Meet Play-i Bo & Yana

Bo

Bo is an explorer. Bo is playful and curious. Bo loves going on adventures and making new friends. As you play together Bo learns new skills and becomes a more capable robot. 

Yana

Yana is a story teller. Yana is clever, imaginative, and full of dreams. Yana can surprise and entertain you by bringing characters to life as you play. Use the power of your imagination to unlock Yana's potential. 

Here's how it works: a child uses the drag-and-drop visual programming interface on an iPad  to map out some commands or movements for Bo. When the child indicates that he is finished, the app trasmits to Bo via bluetooth. With Bo, the kids got tools they need to program themselves. This is a wonderful way for kids to accomplish things. Bo gets its name from a simplified version of the word "robot", Yana is an acronym: You are Not alone. The two can be programmed separately, or to respond to one another. Yana is a light, durable ball suitable for even younger kids. 

The team developed Yana or we can say Yana came into existence based on the interest of the kids. Initially there was only Bo, and the kids want Bo to fly,leap,jump etc. All these came into existence with Yana, where the kids spin it and becomes a helicopter, they might shake it and suddenly changes into an animal. Its really amazing what the kids do with Yana. Among Bo and Yana, Bo is much more complex. With the 3D visual interface, kids can program him to act out extended sequences, even playing "Twinkly Twinkle little star". 

Currently Gupta and his team are working to make sure that Bo grows along with kids. They are making an iPad app based on Scratch, MIT's programming language for kids, and perhaps even more sophisticated languages later on. 

With their API for developers, we will get full control over all of Bo and Yana's capabilities in the language and on the platform of our choice. Continually API is evolving and defining and the in future we can see much more developments. 

Play-i was founded with the mission to bring the joy and magic of programming to every child. And I would really say that you kid never want to miss Play-i.

Play-i team