On April 16th, we were invited to Ordblindeinstituttet (Dyslexic Institute) to get a feel of how Fable is being used in teaching.
The teachers ‘experience was that the interest in robot programming was so great that the students’ interest was maintained for much longer than they were used to in ordinary education.
The students were very quick to catch how Fable worked and how they could interact with- and program the robot.
The students liked the program that could remotely control Fable’s arms and a pair of students got the idea to build a 4-arm version of Fable where each of the 2 students controlled 2 of the arms.

“We saw that Fable was really good at creating a common interest in a subject that created creativity. Virtually all the students got ideas and built constructions that went beyond what we expected. It was very liberating to see that dyslexic children draw on some other resources than other children who tend to “follow the recipe”.”

There was also the work of the maze that the students loved and the social version where Fable changed facial expressions and positions when it could detect that there was a human being in front of it.
The teacher had already prepared the students to receive a robot in a short space of time. He also showed some videos about future technology and an article about the first robot that will be employed in 2018, so the students (if possible) became even more interested in the subject than they were before.
When working with young people, robots and apps are something that appeals to them.

“In Nature & Technology, Nature has always been easy, but Technology has always been challenging.
It is important to us that we can do it as visually as possible, to get the students to understand why we need coding. Why it’s important for us to understand what the robot does when it does the different things. I have to admit that for me it has always been difficult to understand what coding does. What can programming do for us? Why is it important to have coding? Fable gives the students an understanding of why the robot does as it does, and Fable makes it very visual what happens.”