19 Oct 2025
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 Technically Unimportant Things (TuT): Botley

 At last we had our son's birthday party, which was rescheduled due to my messy
 work trip plans recently.

 Since he is a big boy now, I thought I could buy him something educational as
 birthday present. After some search, an idea just randomly came up - may be an
 AI companion would do?

 I had some search online. There are now more and more AI robots designed for
 kids. They have this and that certificates showing how safe they are. It seems
 the more popular ones are a robot that doubles as a tablet for kids' shows and
 a robot dog that has rich emotions.

 I won't buy an AI companion for myself. I heard some benefit from having a pal
 to talk to, but not me yet. However, if it is for my little one and if it can
 make him happy, why not?

 But it is lucky that I can keep my cool when it comes to buying things for my
 child. There are quite a number of, if not all, robots that are using ChatGPT
 as the "AI". It is quite interesting because on one hand, we are complaining
 that AI has bad influences and often tell teenagers to kill themselves; On the
 other hand, we give certificates to these companies and tell parents the LLMs
 are safe for your kids.

 One of my friend said may be they have some safety measures installed for this
 kind of application. But knowing how companies build wrappers for their own
 chatbots, I believe it is those "prompt magic" by the "prompt magicians" - by
 adding some conditions before the real users' prompt, like "Let's assume you
 are talking to a 5-year-old child..." or something similar.

 In the end, I decided that it is not a good idea to have AI, but a robot is. I
 bought Botley, the Coding Robot instead. I wasn't, or probably still am not, a
 fan of those "learn to code" toys. Not this robot too. It is quite like "Logo"
 back in school - you learn giving a series of commands to make something act
 as you expect, but it is not coding. I saw it as a pure electonic toy, like a
 breadboard-friendly slider I bought for my son the other day, now siting on
 his little table as a toy...
 
 My son found out where I hid it before I could give him a surprise. He likes
 it and played a lot with it. I was surprised because after learning how to
 play with Botley, he was patiently inputting commands that move the robot
 forward then back to the start point. There were quite a few times I wanted
 to tell him how he should enter those commands for "fancier moves", but some
 change in perspective stopped me from doing that.

 There were quite a number of times my little one will just repeat the same set
 of commands for a few times. He was happy to see the repetition so I shouldn't
 mind. But if I think about it from a coding perspective, I do always recompile
 and flash the same blinky program into the chip and watch the LED blink!

 When he told the robot to move forward, then manually moved the robot to the a
 new position and let it drive to a new direction, doesn't it work like manual
 data patches in between processes?

 When he found out the commands didn't work, he pressed on the stop button on
 the robot, and it is ctrl+c for you...

 When he counted the steps to take Botley to a destination, it is logic design
 phase; When in reality Botley travelled a bit further than he expected, that's
 the design didn't work out.

 When he worked out a set of commands with his daddy, that's pair-programming.
 
 It was fun looking at him playing and imagining those programming challenges.
 I think if anything, the toy prepares children the mentality to face those
 hassles. Maybe they are right about Botley being a coding toy. :O