In January 2012 I took a trip to the London Science Museum with my family. Whilst wandering
through the exhibitions I came across one of the first Turtle robots built in the 1970s and
it brought back a lot of memories from my childhood. My father was a teacher and involved in
the early days of computing in schools using the BBC Micro computers. One of the best
accessories for this amazing bit of kit was a dome shaped plexiglass "Turtle" robot that you
could make draw shapes as a route into learning the basics of programming. I was struck by
how complex it was (and how expensive it must have been - you only ever had one per school
and it was a treasured piece of equipment) and thought to myself that with modern open
hardware platforms it should be relatively straightforward to make a new version that could
be built by the children themselves.
As the father of two children I'm passionate about the possibilities that arise from teaching
children about technology. There's a fantastic resurgence in teaching children about
technology, driven by the likes of Code Club and Young Rewired State that gives me some
faith that after so many years of just learning about Powerpoint, things are moving back in
the right direction. Children have "Turtle" robots in their schools already, but these are
more like toys and are quickly dismissed because they generally aren't as much fun as the
other toys they have. I believe (and evidence has shown) that if children are engaged in
building something, their engagement levels will be considerably higher in using it as a
result.
Mirobot is the result of this history. It's a 100% open source, open hardware drawing robot
that is low cost so that schools can afford to let every child build one. It uses WiFi so
that it's easy to get up and running and has been carefully designed to eliminate a lot of
the difficulties that children would normally have in building something like this. The
pilot version launched on
Kickstarter in 2014 and the final version launched a year later, also on
Kickstarter.