These Cute Robots Will Help Your Kids Learn To Program

Play-iPlay-i's Bo and Yana.

Tech wonks like Mark Zuckerberg are whipping everyone up into a comp-sci frenzy. You don't even need to be known for your coding to recommend others learn how to do it. The attitude among those who care about technology is nearly a consensus: You need to learn to program a computer, and you need to learn now!

It's no stretch to say that computer literacy is only getting more and more important if you hope to be professionally mobile nowadays. You can't deny the value of sitting down at a computer and not getting immediately flummoxed by a tiny problem. Imagine what you could do if you could dig down to the nitty-gritty of it all and learn to speak to computers in their own language?

Why not get your kids started on it today?

That's the idea behind Play-i, a company making a pair of kid-friendly robots named Bo and Yana. They're designed to get younger children introduced to the concepts behind computer programming. Play-i is crowdfunding in order to kick off production, but they've already hit their $250,000 goal and there's close to a month left to get involved.

Play-i's first robot, Bo, is a mobile platform that can follow commands that your child programs via a kid-friendly iPad app. The other one, Yana, is a motion detector. The best way to see how they work is to watch them in action in the video below: