Little Miss has had some time learning about STEM and coding through a library program before our library was forced to cancel these programs. When the chance arrived to try out the Smart Buddies at Home – Jodi from Pitsco Education we jumped at the chance!
What Is It
The Smart Buddies at Home are a fun way for your child to learn a beginning coding, or learn more about coding if they have already started learning about it. With the Smart Buddies at Home, we got Jodi the doll, her self balancing robot scooter called the Siggy, and a USB charger. We downloaded the app on our Kindle, you can also get it on iOS, Android, and Chromebook. From the website, I was able to download the Smart Buddies at Home Coding Program Parent Guide. From here, we were ready to go!
How Did We Use It
We did not schedule this in our daily homeschool schedule. Instead, we used this as a fun break from school. Don’t tell Little Miss all that she was learning while she was “playing” with this “toy”. She absolutely loved having the free time to play with this. She just wanted to play.
However, I took the time to check out the Parent’s Guide. This gave me a great introduction to this Smart Buddy. There are three tasks to do in Activity One. This is the introduction activity. This will introduce you and your child to the program and pseudocode. Since Little Miss has already done some coding, she was kind of bored during this stage. For those new to coding, this is a great way to get their brains thinking in the coding frame.
Activities two and three get your child use to using the app and your Smart Buddy. These will help you through the tutorials that are on the app. Completing these tutorials will help your child be able to use the app and the Smart Buddy with ease. Following these activities are two more. There is The Hot Dog Challenge and creating your own challenges. When they say challenge, they mean it. These will force your child to think outside of the box.
We took our time with these activities. While Little Miss wanted to play, I could tell that these would be very important activities to complete if we really wanted to learn more about coding. These activities built on each other and allowed us to benefit the most from using this fun “toy” in our home and homeschool.
After we completed these activities, it was no holds bar for Little Miss. I allowed her to do as she wished with her new Smart Buddy. Even though we were done with the suggested activities, she was still learning each time she opened the app. There is no end to the learning that can happen with the Smart Buddy!
What Did We Think
Little Miss was in love. She loved the fact that she could control this whole thing from her Kindle. She had so much fun learning more about coding. This fun little toy added so much learning into the summer days. I loved that she could learn while playing since she doesn’t like sitting down with textbooks that much. Working through the activities allowed us to learn a lot more about how coding worked and allowed us to learn more about our Smart Buddy.
[bctt tweet=”Little Miss was in love. She loved the fact that she could control this whole thing from her Kindle.”]
After going through the activities, Little Miss had a lot of fun just playing around with all the different options. This allowed her to express herself with coding. We loved the Smart Buddy and we hope to add more to the house!
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If you are interested in a Smart Buddy, Pitsco Education is giving one away. Check it out right here: https://offers.pitsco.com/smart-buddies-at-home-giveaway
