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Fisher-Price Now Has a Toy That Teaches Preschoolers How to Code

When is the ideal time to start your child on the path to a comfortable and mostly satisfying career as a developer? High school? Grade School? Fisher-Price thinks preschoolers should be introduced to the problem solving skills they might one day need to be a great coder.

To help parents accept that developing apps for a smartphone might soon replace Sesame Street as their child’s favorite pastime, Fisher-Price has gone and named its new coding toy the Think & Learn Code-a-Pillar. Aw, we can’t stay mildly disgusted at the idea of you!

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More info on the toy will be made available come Toy Fair in February, but what we know now is that the various segments of the Code-a-Pillar’s body double as action and directional commands. So how a child arranges them in sequence changes how the Code-a-Pillar will roll around a room.

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It’s programming at its most rudimentary, but Fisher-Price claims the toy builds the basic skills needed to understand more complex programming languages later in life. The Think & Learn Code-a-Pillar also connects to a free companion app, which proposes additional programming challenges for kids to solve as they get older.

[Fisher-Price]

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