My Robotic Friends

*Starred Review* Is any love greater than that between a boy and his robot? While picking pinecones, a boy meets a bright-red, rocket-shaped robot and asks, “Want to play? “Affirmative!” the robot responds, and the pair has tons of fun until a rock bumps the robot’s power switch off. Not understanding the bot’s unresponsiveness, the boy wheels him home and begins feeding him applesauce, reading him a story, and crafting a makeshift bed. When the boy’s parents, unaware of a robot behind the door, check on their son, the door bumps the robot’s power switch back on. Not distinguishing the boy’s unresponsiveness as sleep, the robot, in a humorous reversal, fears the boy has malfunctioned and carries him back to his laboratory, where he gives him oil and begins to prepare a new battery—when, just in time, the not-evil-at-all inventor shows up to put things right. The spare text (“Boy! You-are-fixed!”) replicates the steady beats of the simple yet comedic story, while Yaccarino’s expressive, quirky, and humorously geometric gouache illustrations make the boy and robot’s relationship all the more endearing. The final, nearly wordless pages, with snapshots of the friends at play, are priceless. Preschool-Grade 1. –Angela Leeper

Vocabulary:

Algorithm – A series of instructions on how to accomplish a task
Coding – Transforming actions into a symbolic language
Debugging – Finding and fixing issues in code
Function – A piece of code that can be called over and over
Parameters – Extra bits of information that you can pass into a function to customize it

After sharing Boy + Bot with kindergarten students and maneuvering them to their seat with “Robot Vocabulary”, we gathered around the iPads to try some programming of our own! Using the free app, Daisy Dinosaur, the students were able to program a cute green dinosaur move with their commands. Their excitement was exceeded by their engagement! Give it a try!

Watch the screencast tutorial below.