Everyone wants kids to learn to code, but the message seems somehow more meaningful coming from adorable knee-high robots. Next week, Westport Library in Connecticut will introduce Vincent and Nancy, a pair of autonomous robots that can walk, dance, kick small balls, carry on conversations in 19 languages, and recognize faces. More importantly for Westport, they can be programmed with new „skills“ using languages like Python and Java. The $8,000 machines (purchased with money from private donations) are made by a French robotics company called Aldebaran and better known as Nao robots. They come with an array of microphones, cameras, and touch sensors, and they run on a software platform that’s supposed to be easy to learn; there’s also…
