Learning to Code With a Sphero

From The New Yorker:

"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. A Sphero, which costs a hundred and thirty dollars, is chiefly a toy. Its “out-of-the-box experience,” to use the industry parlance, is excellent. 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. It also moves in water, though much more slowly. 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 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. (It has an accelerometer.) Because it looks like an ordinary ball, it outperforms your expectations. 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 bounced off the concrete sidewalk, hit my rental car, and came to a stop. As soon as we linked it up with a smartphone, off it rolled."