This is the story about how we get inspired by Makeblock’s product.
As a long-time enthusiast of technology, play the robotics is part of nature. Around 2013, when Lego EV3 was launched on the market, I am among the first group of person who pre-order it and start to play with it.
To be honest, EV3 is fun, and the learning curve is not high, plus, it can be reassembly to different model, which is really fun to be played by my son, even he does not have any patient to play the coding, but he spends a good trunk of his morning to build the new toy. Still, I feel something not perfect fit here. Is it too expensive, at a price tag $349, it is not cheap, but it is a middle-end toy, which can be really worth it?
The EV3 end its life by stock in the shelve, nobody touches it for a long while. Until one day in 2015, I saw the kickstart program, there is a company name “Makeblock”, who claim to build the most affordable small robot, and “one robot for one kid”. I check it out, figure out $40 is a great deal (compare to more than $349 I spent on EV3).
After the long two month wait, I finally received my first mBot (shipping from China, that is why it takes so long), I can not hold my breath, and put it together instantly, surprisingly, it comes out of box with some nice demo, such as object avoidance, and line follower, plus remote control car. It amazed me that this small toy-like robot has so many features and so powerful.
Then, in the second week, my son shot one of his first youtube video, which is the instruction of how to assemble his new toy — — mBot. Soon, it does not a toy anymore, he starts to learn the basic programming, using the Scratch-like mBlock to code the little robot and play around.
Then, at 2017, I bought the Codey Rocky, then 2018, Makeblock Neuron, at the beginning of this year (2019), I bought Halocode board, every time, it did not disappoint me, it is a truly affordable, plus really nice design.
I feel fortunate that I discover this nice company named “Makeblock” in 2015, it changed my prospect of the STEM education device, and it changed lots of my friends in the last couple of years.
It is hard to create a really nice product, and harder to keep making the new exciting product, but for Makeblock, they create five series of product lines, win multiple Reddot design award (the Oscar for industry design), they sold millions of mBot and other products over the time, I wish them the best, and see more products in the future.
The original post was posted at July 26th, 2019
The link of original post: https://medium.com/@youthinnolab/why-do-i-believe-in-makeblock-aba12a6e8533