Hey guys, Aidan here from Core Electronics and today we're going to take a look at an exciting new product from Evolve Incorporated over in the USA. That product is Ozobots. Now what Ozobots are is they're tiny little smart robots that we can use color-coded markers and codes to program.

The way it works is there's some little colour sensors on the bottom of their Ozobots and they'll read the colours they're driving over and perform actions due to the colour codes. So let's just jump into it and show you how easy Ozobots are to use. Now the idea behind them is any kid from anywhere with no knowledge of electronics or programming or anything like that should be able to jump into some Ozobot play and in no time at all they'll start understanding the ideas behind programming and coding.

So the first thing we need to do is just calibrate our Ozobot's colour sensor. So once he starts flashing white we whack him on the black circle. He's flashed green which means he's ready to be programmed. Now to make an Ozobot just drive straight forward all we need to do is draw a nice straight black line. What he's going to do is read it and if it's black he'll just keep driving forward. So I'm just going to make this one nice and thick so it doesn't get off course too easily.

Now we just press the button on the side of our Ozobot and place him down and he's going to go ahead and follow that path all the way along. Now that's pretty cool we can draw any sort of patterns or mazes we want but the real value here is to be able to program them. So let's take a look at actually programming an Ozobot.

So let's just use the first code here the snail dose it's cool. So that's what that's going to do is just slow our Ozobot right down. So every single code that we draw with Ozobots must start with black and end with black and in between we just draw about a centimetre square will work colour code. So this one is a red green blue one so I've just got some textures here that I'm using to do that so red and then green and then blue should do it. And like I said you get to terminate that one with a black code.

So what we should see is our Ozobot should follow this and then slow down after he gets that code. All right so we've covered off on some speed stuff let's have a look at a directional code. So I can see the u-turn code here let's give that one a go. So what we might do is we'll draw a black line just like that and then we'll draw a u-turn code on either side of that black line. So we'll draw a black line and then we'll draw a u-turn so hopefully if we do it right our Ozobot will just turn around once he gets to the end and then turn around again. Remember we've got to make them kind of defined on our squares. So blue red blue blue red blue and put them back. And remember every code has to start and end with black.

So what should happen here is he's going to read that code do a u-turn and go back. What happens if we place him here he'll read that code do a u-turn. So that's the basics of Ozobot and how fun it is you can imagine that having a class full of kids each with their own little Ozobot you could draw up a ton of mazes they could get really used to programming these things. There's some cool moves you can also do with like spins and zigzags and you can start counting and even do exit conditions for your track and stuff like that.

So there is no limit to what you can do with just a pack of text as an Ozobot. The good thing is they use rechargeable batteries on the inside and come with a small charging cable which is just a micro USB plug that plugs into the side of your Ozobot. But if you wanted to extend yourself just a little bit further with your Ozobot what you can do is jump on the OzoBlockly site. Now if you've ever seen Blockly before you'll know what it is and how it works but the basic idea of it is visual block-based programming.

So instead of having to type out and maybe getting caught up in the syntax of programming you can just drag and drop just simple programming blocks that tell you exactly what they're going to do and they've got a few variables that you can change. For example I've got this one here so we just did that u-turn code there what I might do is just change this one to be something similar. So what we can see is this is going to repeat this statement forever so it's going to repeat forever and it's going to do this it's going to move forward 10 steps really quickly do a u-turn to the left then move forward 10 steps really quickly and do a u-turn to the right.

So you can imagine that this is very simple for a young student to pick up and the idea is that they can just jump into it with little to no guidance. There's it doesn't really need to be there they can sort of just read the screen and see what's happening. Now to get this working we put our ozobot up against our screen there's a little white dot so I've got the ozobot against it now when I press load it's going to flash but nothing's happening what I need to do is hold in our ozobot so turn him on so you turn on your ozobot put him up against the screen and press load. So if he's flicking green which my one is that means he's being uploaded with his instructions so that's all well and good and he's just got this nice green glow now and the instructions on the screen tell you just double press the button.

So now I can take away that texter drawn artwork there and we can just double press the power button and we can see how it works. So that's my ozobot just following the code that I've written. So yeah that's the idea behind ozobot and this is the ozobot fit. If you wanted to extend yourself even further past this there's an application for iPads and iDevices that you can download and import songs into and then you can make your ozobot ozobot dance to the beat of a song. Alternatively you can follow the challenges and the lessons that are online for ozobots they've got a ton of educational content on their educational resources list.

So that's pretty much the basics of what an ozobot is. I hope you guys have really enjoyed this sort of demonstration on what it is. If you want any more information about ozobots or anything educational please jump on the website coreelectronics.com.au we'll be happy to help you out and answer any questions you have. Thanks for watching guys have a great day.