These smart toy cars teach kids programming and robotics, and schools are snapping them up

It takes a robocar to shoot past a crowdfunding target on Kickstarter in two hours flat. Cannybots did that yesterday.

It’s a build-your-own robot kit that lets kids aged six to 12 assemble smart cars and race them. Unlike a slot car guided in grooves by remote control, the Cannybots can be controlled by smartphones or tablets. They have “eyes” [optical sensors] on their bellies to follow black lines on a race track, as well as a third eye to discern color patterns for the start and finish lines or other game situations.

The robocars support simple programming through an app called CannyTalk. It lets kids enter words in everyday English to make the cars switch lanes or perform other cool maneuvers. For example, kids can just type something like “go fast” or “slow down” in the app’s artificial intelligence-powered chat interface and the Cannybot will obey. For younger kids, Cannybots has a graphical programming app to set commands using buttons.

A variety of racetracks can be downloaded and printed – from a Nascar-style figure-eight to a maze – or simply designed from scratch at home. The robocar designs can also be customized with a home 3D printer. Thus, apart from being fun toys, they introduce kids to programming, designing, and robotics, drawing inspiration from Marshall McLuhan: “Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”

The starting line

Anish Mampetta, CEO and co-founder at Cannybots, tells Tech in Asia he first thought of building the smart toys when his own kid was two years old. A friend had come home for dinner and talked about how he felt bad to see today’s kids spending hours fiddling with phones and tablets without knowing what was in them or how they worked. “That’s when I realized that my son is going to be just like that. I wanted to do something to change that,” Anish says.

Anish himself had been an incorrigible fiddler with all things mechanical during his childhood in Kerala at the southern tip of India. He grew up in Kozhikode, better known as Calicut, a small city by the coast, steeped in history and great seafood. This is where Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama landed in 1498, “discovering India” for the Europeans and opening the door to a colonial age. Well, that’s another story.

Anish says he struggled with schoolwork because of his insatiable urge to take things apart. “I used to keep getting punished by my parents for destroying things. From my grandma’s tape recorder to the wall clock at home and my toys, I was curious about what was inside and what made them work. That trait made me a practical engineer,” he says. “When I was 12, I saw a program on TV about a Japanese car manufacturing unit which was using robots to build cars. I was fascinated. That really sold robots to me.”

Building a ballbot at Carnegie Mellon

Anish Mampetta (center) and his co-founders Sayi Sagar and Wayne Keenan

This passion for deconstructing and putting things together continued in his college days at the National Institute of Technology in Calicut, where he built a go-kart with parts collected from a junkyard and converted an ordinary wheelchair into a motorized one. “This is where I met my friend Sayi Sagar, and he is now my co-founder.”

Anish’s projects became more complex as he graduated to do a masters in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in the US. There he built a ballbot – a 5-feet-tall mobile robot that can balance on a single eight-inch diameter ball. It was part of research on dynamically stable robots which are safer for human interaction.

A return to childhood

Schools want the bots