Dash Robot by Wonder Workshop - Product Review

Our kids have had a blast playing with a new remote controlled robot this year called Dash from the Wonder Workshop (previously known as Play-i).

Within minutes, they launched into programming the robot on an Apple iPad app called Blockly, using a graphical function building block programming language, and all this without reading any instruction manuals. Definitely the biggest hit as far as presents went this Christmas in our home.

The setup and time to play is virtually an instantaneous one-touch experience.

There are 3 iPad apps (also available on Android):
• Go - movement joystick and other direct response controls for immediate feedback actions
• Path - draw actions on a map like interface, and the robot will mimic the instructions
• Blockly - graphical functional based programming language, using "Blockly -- Games for tomorrow's programmers"

Dash has many capabilities:
• motion, variable speeds
• lights, multiple adjustable
• object detecting
• sound generation

Dash also updated itself (firmware) when we first connected him to the Go app, so the future extensibility seems quite wide open.

For more detailed product information, please check out:

Dash and Dot robots are definitely worth checking out in our opinion.

Links to the Apple iPad apps for Dash and Dot (formerly known as Bo and Yana):

In the review I also mention another favourite app of our kids, Hopscotch - Coding for Kids:

And if you were wondering, my daughter was doing all the demo in this video after only 1 day of playing with the 3 controlling apps.

All in all, I have to admit I was very impressed with the responsiveness, the multi-terrain capability between the different surfaces and how intuitive it was to program his actions for my 8 year and 11 year old daughters.

Dash has been a toy that they both keep going back to play with repeatedly, and has an impressive amount of capabilities for them to explore their own creativity with while playing and learning.