Gutierrez Broolyn, founder of Tinybop, a children's app company, is worried that branding will affect children's way of playing. "Today's children's movies and TV programs are great," he said. "But the more and more they use toys, which may limit children's imagination. whether you agree with it or not, it gives birth to many cool children's APP. Robot Factory, one of them, is the first new digital toy developed by Tinybop, which can only run at IOS, with a charge of $3. Like its name, the APP is like an animation studio, and children can design and assemble robots on their own, and the "factory" sets a number of obstacles for children to test their robots. In this highly open system, the robot has two brain, arms and legs can also extend freely. APP provides various components, and children use these components to create their toys and stories.
to design
for imagination, Gutierrez first noticed Lego. Compared with the popular toys he played when he was young, his son's toys always had a clearer purpose. These toy components encourage children to create a particular toy, and the children are very excited after the goal is reached, but it will not tell the children that these components can be used to do anything.
Gutierrez said, "not only is Lego, but virtually all toys, whether virtual or entity, have set a set of specific rules of the game, and use imagination to create, repeat, change, and test specific things that disappear in such toys.
robot factory has completely changed the status quo. It neither sets the rules of the game nor sets the game level. It does not provide operational specifications nor set the game level. It's more like a digital toy to think about, and only focuses on robots.
this APP divides the parts of the robot into a number of types, all kinds of bodies, arms, legs and some small parts (such as antennas, paws, brains on tanks), for example, you can take a tank, a spring, or something like a spider leg as his leg. All components can be assembled together. You can also stretch your legs freely with a spring. Or you stick the spring on the head or side of the robot. Of course, you can also attach five single springs to the robot. These springs extend in all directions, just like the spoke of a wheel. In a word, you can create everything. The APP's instructions were made by British artist Erwin David, and the robot was more like an old Japanese monster movie or a science fiction cover, not the terminator or the Transformers.
physical pleasure
really makes this free creation very interesting: you can test what you create. Tinybop all APP, including interactive books on anatomy and biological community characteristics, have established dynamic animation models. This APP is no exception. Each component of a robot has its unique physical characteristics and different working principles. Different legs are different in weight and the way of exercise is different. Sometimes, the combination of specific components will create new ways of motion. My spring stilts robot can cross all kinds of obstacles. And a little robot like a tank is stuck.
this is a great challenge for engineers. You have no idea what children will use these components to create. Usually, we think that children will follow conventional thinking to create robots with two feet, two arms and one head. But, soon after we saw the tenth or twentieth robots they had created, we found that they could really make a lot of weird things. Therefore, Guterres said that many APP making robots are just deceiving children. Their robots will fly and don't walk. "Let the robot fly, you just need to roll up the background wall without showing the physical principles of the robot walking to the children."
, however, for Tinybop, complex engineering physics engine is the focus of the whole system. It's beautiful to set up animation for a robot in a specific framework, but it just repeats itself, Gutierrez said. "We think that what really attracts children is that they feel they can control the whole animation process." I am not a child, but I know what this means. In robotics factory, you really feel that you are in control of all kinds of animations. You even feel that you have created something that APP developers have never thought of.
for the next few months, Tinybop plans to add some new features to APP: providing more components to allow robots to have more ways of moving, including dancing and hand clapping. But it will never add villains to robots.
Guterres said: "in the long run, the more elements of the game, the greater the restriction. What adults usually think is: what is this game? How to upgrade? How to win the victory? But children think differently. They think, "I created this stuff, and I want to know how it works. Now, I can modify it and create a new thing. "