Roboterra is a small San Jose, California-based start-up with a big ambition: teaching kids around the globe to code. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, it launched a cloud-based robotics coding platform it's calling Castle Rock, that works alongside its robot-in-a-box, Origin Kit.
The Origin Kit is Roboterra's third-generation kit and costs $429. It contains more than 85 types of components manufactured in China. With this kit and and a downloadable app, students can build, program and interact with their robot. The goal is to teach high school and middle-school kids C++ programming.
"The learning that happens at college level — we want to move this down to 10-year-olds," said CEO Yao Zhang. Like many of her team, Zhang is originally from China and attended university in the U.S (she has a Ph.D. from Columbia University). Roboterra has drawn engineers from Apple, Tesla and Google X Lab.