The 75-Year Saga Behind a Game That Teaches Preschoolers to Code

Next month, if you walk into any Target store across the country, browsing one of the main hubs of mass American consumerism, you’ll find a board game that teaches the fundamentals of computer programming to preschoolers. It’s called Robot Turtles. To play, you spread toy turtles across a grid—among various boxes, brick walls, and ice […]
The game Robot Turtles.
With a new board game called Robot Turtles, preschoolers can learn the basics of computer programming.Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Next month, if you walk into any Target store across the country, browsing one of the main hubs of mass American consumerism, you'll find a board game that teaches the fundamentals of computer programming to preschoolers.

It's called Robot Turtles. To play, you spread toy turtles across a grid---among various boxes, brick walls, and ice castles---and then kids use playing cards to guide these wide-eyed reptiles through the various obstacles, in search of colored jewels in the middle of the board. It's a bit like a programmer using software code to guide images and data across a computer screen. "The Game for Little Programmers!" reads the box that will turn up on Target shelves the first week in August.

This wonderfully clever, light-hearted creation is already a sensation in the world of online crowdfunding. Former Google and Microsoft employee Dan Shapiro raised over $631,000 on Kickstarter to build the game last year, and by Christmas, he'd shipped copies to his over 13,700 backers. But now, Robot Turtles is being mass produced by a game company called ThinkFun, and its arrival at Target marks a new milestone for what's known as the "code literacy movement," an effort to bring programming skills to, well, just about everyone.

>The game is a metaphor for the long and steady evolution of computer programming from the most complex and specialized of endeavors to something that anyone can grasp.

A New York outfit called Codeacademy is helping the everyman learn programming skills through free online courses. Drawing on this company's services, the United Kingdom has made coding part of the core curriculum in primary and secondary schools. Projects like Scratch and Google Blockly are creating a whole new type of programming specifically for children. And a wave of children's books are teaching coding concepts at an even younger age. But there's something different about Robot Turtles reaching a major American retail outlet, aiming not just for the kids of Kickstarter-happy professional programmers, but for the kids of ordinary shoppers.

Bill Ritchie and Andrea Barthello, the husband and wife team that developed the logic-game company ThinkFun, at their home in Alexandria, Virginia.

Jared Soares/WIRED

In more ways than one, the new board game serves as a metaphor for the long and steady evolution of computer programming from the most complex and specialized of endeavors to something that practically anyone can grasp. It's not just that Robot Turtles is a new incarnation of Logo, a turtle-centric programming language that aimed coding concepts at children as early as the 1960s. It's that ThinkFun, the company behind the game's push into Target and beyond, can trace its roots through the family of the most important coder in the history of programming---and all the way back to the dawn of the modern computing age.

ThinkFun was founded in 1985 by Bill Ritchie and his wife, Andrea Barthello. Ritchie grew up in the shadow of Bell Labs, the Murray Hill, New Jersey research operation that gave rise to so many fundamental computing technologies, from the digital transistor to the Unix operating system and the C programming language. His father was Alistair Ritchie, who worked on telephone switching technology at Bell Labs. His older brother was Dennis Ritchie, the late programmer who invented C and helped design Unix, technologies that still drive everything from Google to the iPhone. And his "Dutch uncle" was another Bell researcher named Bill Keister, a close friend of his father's who spent decades building puzzle games with the wires, lightbulbs, and switches he found in the Bell stock room. These games eventually gave rise to ThinkFun.

Way back in 1937, drawing on new concepts of Boolean algebra that would drive the digital circuits at the heart of the computer revolution, Keister mapped out an electronic tic-tac-toe machine---what Bill Ritchie calls "literally the first computer game in the history of the world"---and this inspired a whole family of logic puzzles based on the ide of digital information. Ritchie grew up playing these games---wood and wire contraptions with names like "SpinOut" and "The Hexadecimal Puzzle"---and after he met his wife at a rapidly failing real-estate-tax-shelter-syndication company in the mid-80s, they decided to build their own company around Keister's creations. "The idea was to draw on the work of all the brilliant recreational mathematicians and physicists and engineers and other crazy people out there, like the Bell Labs people I had known as a little kid, like my father’s friends, like the friends of my brother Dennis," Ritchie remembers.

Bill Keister with the "unbeatable" tic-tac-toe machine.

Courtesy of Andrea Barthello/Bell Labs Archive

Over the years, the company would develop and expand and commercialize similarly clever games from designers across the world, including everything from a mind-sharpening traffic game known as Rush Hour, created by a Japanese inventor named Nob Yoshigahara, to the mental gymnastics of Math Dice, designed by the Ritchies' then 11-year-old son, Sam. After teaching himself to program while building a digital version of Rush Hour for the Apple iPhone, Sam would go on to serve as a key engineer at Twitter, helping to build a sweeping coding system called Summingbird.

In other words, Robot Turtles fits quite nicely into a 75-year story arc. In the beginning, if you wanted a computer to do something new, you had to build new hardware, much like Bill Keister, who, in 1946, sent the plans for his tic-tac-toe game to a Long Island electronics shop for manufacturing. Then came machine code---software closely tied to computer hardware---that made things a bit easier. Then people like Dennis Ritchie built broad programming languages that let large numbers of programmers build software for a wide array of machines. And now, things like Robot Turtles seek to expand the programming class even further.

Aimed at children ages 4 and older, the game lets them "code" the movements of the turtles, playing various cards in a particular order. They can play these cards individually, as you would type a single instruction into a computer command line, or they can lay down a series of cards all at once, as if compiling a complete program. They can also use "functions"---embodied by frogs---to repeat the same set of command again and again, and there are simple ways they can "debug" what they've done. "It's just a really good metaphor for programming," Ritchie says of the game.

No, it won't turn your preschooler into a bone fide hacker overnight. But it lays the groundwork for future adventures in programming--adventures that can extend well beyond the business of computers. Ritchie and Shapiro aren't on a mission to turn everyone on earth into professional coder, but they do believe that anyone can benefit from having programming skills-=-or at least understanding programming concepts. "This is about building what's called the 'executive function'---the ability to stay on task, set planning, understand what your objective is, and staying focused," Ritchie says. "Coding is about organizing your thinking, visualizing from the beginning through to the end, working through all the details."

The Hexadecimal Puzzle, one of the original games offered by ThinkFun, was based on another Bill Keister creation.

Jared Soares/WIRED

Mitchel Resnick, who leads the Scratch team at MIT, agrees. "It's great for kids to get an understanding computation thinking, and a game like this is a great way for them to do that," he says. "Children need a better understanding of how the world works, and in today's world, they are surrounded by computational objects."

You could even look at Shapiro as living proof of this phenomenon. He learned to program from his father, a professor of computer science at the University of Portland. As a 7-year-old, he sat on his father's knee---literally---while coding his own Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type game in the Basic programming language that came with the Commodore 64 home computer in the '80s, and then, when he was a senior in high school, his father taught him serious coding through the classic textbook, The C Programming Language, co-authored by C's creator: Dennis Ritchie. But Shapiro didn't become a programmer per se. He became an engineer and an entrepreneur, eventually selling a six-month-old startup to Google.

But not everyone has a computer science professor for a father. And that's why Shapiro kickstarted Robot Turtles. He originally designed it for his own young children, but then he realized the potential audience was much bigger. As it turns out, the audience was even larger than that, and with ThinkFun's involvement, it could be larger still.

What's more, there's a nice symmetry to the game's progress---symmetry being something that's so valued in the world of programming. When he designed the game, Shapiro gave names to the four "function frogs," and one of them was named for Dennis Ritchie. He likes the arrangement with ThinkFun because his family "loves to shop at Target," but also because he has found a kindred spirit. "I had heard from a lot of people while working on the game that this was something that would never fly, that it would never work on store shelves," he says. "But then I talked to Bill." Dennis Ritchie's brother said something very different. "Whoever you were talking to wasn't me," he told Shapiro, "because this is exactly the sort of thing that we love."