Mills’s goal that day was to harness the class’s ongoing study of the environment to promote some basic programming skills. Yet technical fixes are often seductive to educators, especially a technical fix like Sphero, whose surface has two cute blue dots and an upswept blue coif, suggesting a tiny face. And some studies suggest that the more children interact with devices the harder time they have interacting with one another. Putting young children in front of screens will likely make them better coders, but what will go unlearned during those hours? Education is not merely job training. Sphero and similar toys like Lego Mindstorms-simple robots that you build and then code-have come to be seen as stops on the road to the well-salaried position of programmer. Many teachers foresaw a crisis: only sixteen per cent of high-school seniors contemplate a career in stem fields, even though the number of stem jobs is increasing rapidly.
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Educators avidly debated how to help kids transition from the analog world of early childhood to the digital world of adults. The stem movement-the effort to incorporate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics into the classroom-was gaining in popularity. It was a fortuitous moment to create such a crossover product. Eventually, they realized that if the app came with a simplified form of that code, kids would fiddle with it.
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Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson, the inventors who came up with the Sphero, six years ago, were immersed in hacker culture, and they planned to disseminate portions of their code to anyone who wanted to improve on it or add to it. The toy’s infiltration of the classroom came about mostly by accident. They can code them, too, to take a first step into computer programming. Students have begun using them to learn everything from geometry to genetics. Spheros aren’t just fun they are also an excellent teaching tool. As soon as we linked it up with a smartphone, off it rolled. It bounced off the concrete sidewalk, hit my rental car, and came to a stop. The makers of the device, a company that is also called Sphero, are in Boulder, and at their offices I was encouraged to toss one of the balls out a second-story window. (It has an accelerometer.) Because it looks like an ordinary ball, it outperforms your expectations. It will vibrate softly, like a purring cat, and you can code it to do a lot of fanciful things: dance to the “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy,” perform playful flips, find its way around the things it bumps into, and blink if it falls over an edge. A Sphero can make hairpin turns, and, thanks to its gyroscope, it is aware of your location with one gesture, you can order it to roll back to you. It also moves in water, though much more slowly.
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You download an app, and, by pressing and swiping and swirling your finger on your smartphone or tablet screen, you can command the ball to travel a zippy five or so miles an hour on land. Its “out-of-the-box experience,” to use the industry parlance, is excellent. A Sphero, which costs a hundred and thirty dollars, is chiefly a toy. You tap a Sphero twice to turn it on, and it flashes three colors in quick succession once it has established a wireless link to your iPad or your smartphone, it strobes like a fortune-teller’s crystal ball and is ready to move. The leaders grabbed their Spheros and hurried with the other students to the school’s former library, now known as the Digital Commons. Mills had divided her class into groups of three, and the leaders of each trio hurried over to a counter where ten Spheros-milky white orbs about the size of navel oranges-sat in blue charging cradles. On a recent weekday morning, Anna Mills, a sixth-grade science teacher, shouted from the front of the classroom, “Grab your iPads and your Spheros!” When her command didn’t work, she clapped twice, and this code was successful: her two dozen students clapped back, roughly in unison, and began getting up from their desks. A stuffed grizzly that once stood at the entrance has been banished to a dusky back hallway, and many of the students are the children of tech workers. Illustration by John HerseyĪt Trail Ridge Middle School, which is forty minutes north of Denver, in Longmont, the old Colorado is giving way to the new. Children can program Sphero, a white plastic orb, to traverse land and water.
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