Gadgetory

here with us today is a and Bernstein co-founder of Orbotix now you've brought the Olli in to show us a part of the shape how does the Olli differ from the sparrow um so unlike Spiro which is sort of a more general device you can do a lot of different things with Sphero Ollie is really just about driving crazy crazy driving fun and tricks so all he actually goes about six and a half meters per second if you hit a little ramp on the ground that's maybe ten centimeters tall it can it can jump about a metre and a half in the air and when you're in the air you can do different tricks you can cause it to spin directions repeatedly do different tricks record those tricks and share them with your friends so a month and a half ago either would spark don't you tell us a bit about spark so spark is our program to teach kids programming and basic math skills so right now we're using Spiro in schools so we have over a thousand sphero's in over 125 schools museums and other places where they're teaching these kids program using a couple of our apps so we have an app that we've created for the phone called macro lab that lets you put a series of commands in visually so you don't have to write any code and then you can play that sequence back alright so I'm going to give you a quick demo here of macro lab and we're gonna program the ball to change color and then drive forward for a certain amount of time so you get this little plus sign just say Drive it's the name of our macro and now you can hit this plus sign in the corner to add all these different commands so we're gonna add a RGB color command you can set the color to whatever we want and with red green and blue I'll create that and then we'll add a new command we're gonna add a roll command so you can give it a speed so we'll say a little over half speed and then you give it an angle from 0 to 360 degrees we'll say 0 degrees which will make it go straight we'll create that now we also need to give it a little bit of a delay so how long is it going to drive forward so we go down to the delay command and this is in milliseconds so 1000 milliseconds is 1 second so we'll create that and then after we drive we want it to stop so we're gonna add a stop command so now if I hit this little play button on the bottom spero is gonna drive forward for one second and how have kids been responding to this program it's been great super awesome I think because it's a it's a fun gaming robot and there's all these games and they get to play around with it and then program it they kind of come at it from a different angle so it's not it's not an educational robot that doesn't do anything until they program it it's a fun gaming robot that they also get to program so the kids snap so much fun if they want to take a little break from programming they can watch one of our apps and play the game for a little bit and then go back to programming and they get really excited the app macro lab was actually built for our internal developers so that we could quickly just test little ideas without having to write any code and I forget how it sort of got out to kids but we realized that this app you know was so much cooler than just you know using it internally so we ended up launching in the App Store and then we went to a couple schools to start you know see if it the idea actually worked to use it as as a teaching tool or a teaching app and yeah I mean just seeing the reaction of the kids was awesome and we launched our spark program a month and a half ago on April 15th