Hi Karl,
This is a nice example and looks like the kids/family are having fun and learning at the same time. I have used some activities like these with my young students and notice how strictly they enforce precision when they are they robot and how that improves precision when it is their turn controlling the robot.

Lenny Pitt, CS UIUC, wrote/compiled a set of lessons called MathmaniaCS. http://www.mathmaniacs.org/
We have used several of these with teachers in our Google grant summer workshops: Introduction to Programming with Etoys. The responses from teachers, at the workshop and later in the evaluations, have been very favorable. Followup evaluations from teachers indicate they are using some of the lessons and plan to use more.  As far as I can tell from their responses, they were not aware of these kinds of activities before the workshop.

Regards,
Kathleen

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From: etoys-dev-bounces@squeakland.org [etoys-dev-bounces@squeakland.org] on behalf of karl ra mberg [karlramberg@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2012 2:00 PM
To: etoys dev
Subject: [etoys-dev] how-to-train-your-robot

A nice write up of how one can get young kids into programming

http://drtechniko.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your-robot/

Karl