This is the mBot2 educational robotic ecosystem by Makeblock, a medium dollar system that punches well above its weight in terms of features and quality. It's got wheeled bots, tracked bots, a solid aluminium construction system, an ESP32 packed with sensors and features, and a great Python and block coding experience. Let's get into it.

The original mBot series launched over a decade ago, and it was pretty good, kind of Makeblock's breakout product. The new mBot2 series builds upon the original series with a few goodies that make it sometimes feel like it dips into the territory of premium kits that are well beyond this price range. Now, there are some options in terms of kits. We're looking at the Rover here, which contains the base model mBot2 starter kit and a box of parts to upgrade it to the Rover platform.

Let's start with one of the big things, the construction system. mBot opts for an aluminium system that uses these anodized blue aluminium parts, which are bolted together mostly with standard M4 bolts. While this system is a little bit slower to build with than something like the snap together Lego Technic style system you would find in higher end VEX IQ kits, these aluminium parts do make this feel really solid and it's a little more reflective of what you'd be building in the real world. You use a lot of aluminium extrusion and bolts like this.

The bot has quite a bit of heft to it and it feels harder to break than plastic parts. Something to keep in mind with this system, though, is that there are some threaded parts that might strip if a kid tightens a bolt with all their might. So it is important to just make sure kids are only nipping things up only as tight as they need to be. But as long as certain parts aren't comically over tightened, I feel you're going to get more uses out of this construction system. And again, it just feels so darn solid and sturdy.

Mounting onto the chassis is the CyberPi and its module system. This is the little computer that you're actually going to be programming, which is an ESP32 microcontroller running some custom, almost operating system like firmware. The CyberBrick by itself has enough bells and whistles to be a pretty decent educational toy. It's got Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, meaning it can do very basic IoT projects. It's got a gyroscope and accelerometer on it, as well as a small color screen and a microphone and speaker.

But the mBot2 kit also comes with a shield or carrier board for it, which adds a rechargeable battery, some RGB LEDs, a light sensor, and allows you to connect mBot series modules like the included ultrasonic sensor for distance measuring and obstacle avoidance, an RGB color sensor for line following and color detecting, as well as two servo motors for controlling the angle of something like a set of arms, and two DC motors, which are probably going to be driving the bot around. These motors have encoders in them as well, which is really nice because you can not only tell it to rotate at a certain power level, but also rotate at a certain set RPM or rotate by a certain amount of degrees.

There are more motors and sensors available outside of the kit if you have a certain project in mind, but the ones included in the kit are probably more than enough for a typical classroom environment. In terms of the build experience, it's pretty darn good. The instructions are clear, it's hard to miss a step, and there's also just lots of little things that make it a pleasant experience. Like when it asks for a bolt, it gives you a scale image of the bolt that you're after. The plugs on the modules only fit in the correct orientation, and the sensors daisy chain together with I2C.

There aren't too many annoying or fiddly steps as well, and in terms of age appropriateness for construction, I feel like the Rover platform is more suitable for the 12 plus age range, while the basic mBot2 starter kit is more suitable for the 8 plus age range. The Rover is just a little bit more fiddly and involved. So, you go through and you build your kit, there's a few preloaded demos on the CyberPi, which is really nice to get you going instantly, but then you get to arguably the most important aspect of a robotics kit, the coding experience.

There's a few options here, but it's probably all going to be done through mBlock, the coding platform from Makeblock. You can use it through an app for mobile devices or on a computer, or you can also get access to it through a browser. mBlock as a coding experience is really good. We just finished making videos on a laser cutter by Xtool, which is a sub-brand of Makeblock. They do software exceptionally well with Xtool, it's one of their major selling points, and the software here is good as well.

It mainly uses this scratch style block coding system that you've probably seen everywhere, and it's really, really well executed. I was having flashbacks to year 7 and 8, which is the last time I was coding with this system. All the usual suspects of this coding style are here, all the logic and operators, as well as blocks for all the additional features. You can control the LEDs, you can play audio, you can draw faces with the included emojis, you can draw your own custom things for the screen, you can read the motion of your CyberPi, you can connect to the internet and get things like weather data, and there's even a method of wirelessly sending data between CyberPis, which is pretty darn neat.

If you use the included Bluetooth remote, there's an add-on for the remote. If you have an extra sensor, there will be a module for it as well. You can upload the code to the CyberPi via Bluetooth or USB, and we didn't have any issues with this. I would imagine though, in a classroom environment, that trying to send code via Bluetooth with 20 or 30 of these bots in a room might get a little bit tricky, so the wired method might be a bit better of a choice there.

A side note, that screen on there is really helpful for debugging issues. You can use it to print out data such as what joystick input the robot is currently getting from the remote, and use that to figure out why it's not turning in the right directions. Having that screen on the bot on the go is just really helpful, and it's a great tool in getting kids to print out important data to help fix issues. Also, you do have the option to code this in Python as well, which I think helps to maybe extend the age suitability range a little bit more, and mBlock even lets you convert your block code to Python code, which is a really nice feature to just help you make that jump to Python code.

I could keep waffling on about the coding experience, but overall, it's really good. It's one of the spots where it feels like it starts to dip into that higher end of the robotics kit market. On top of that, there are some pretty decent educational resources available online, from courses centered around the kit to additional projects to do once you've done finished playing around with the starter kit or the rover platforms. Some of these are really impressive as well.

We only took a glance at it, but there is a machine learning tutorial that takes a cat's meow and translates it into human language. Now, my guess is that's not going to be a super accurate scientific tool, and it's more of a fun toy, but the fact that there are resources teaching high school kids how to collect data and train a custom AI model like this, it speaks volumes of why Makeblock is getting so big. And that is a quick dive into the mBot2 series.

Overall, it's a really solid option for STEM educators or for the young maker at home. I was a 12-year-old kid learning robotics quite a while ago now, and I'm pretty jealous that kids nowadays get access to kits like this. If you do have any questions about the rover or the mBot2 series, feel free to head on over to our community forums. We're all makers over there, and we're happy to help. Until next time, though, happy making.