ENIAC, an edutech company, wanted a hands-on way to teach fundamental programming concepts to very young children — children below the age where typing on a computer is the right medium. I built Cubetto as the POC: a floor-robot that reads physical programs drawn on the floor in coloured paths, no screen required.
The programming language is colour
Kids draw a path on the floor with coloured tape or markers. Each colour means something different — a straight move, a conditional branch, a loop, a waypoint. They can place obstacles along the path; the robot uses ultrasonic and IR distance sensors to see them and trigger conditional logic. A red segment might mean “if obstacle, turn right”. A blue cluster might mean “repeat the next section three times”. The language is the floor drawing.
The robot
The robot reads colours via a downward-facing colour sensor, distances via ultrasonic and IR, communicates over Bluetooth for wireless configuration, and follows the line-following algorithm under the hood. Getting it to disambiguate slightly-different blues from slightly-different purples on printer paper under various lighting conditions was more work than the control logic.
Status
POC only — never launched as a retail product. The first product I worked on with ENIAC. The teaching-materials work that eventually came out of this appears separately on my experiments page as the Hardware Course for Kids.