In the Spark2 Bots With Brains workshop, your child codes a Sphero Indi robot using colour tiles — learning six big ideas every computer scientist uses. Here’s what happens in the lesson, plus six unplugged games to play at home. No screens. No robot. No coding experience needed.
The workshop is a hands-on session with the Sphero Indi — a small, screen-free coding robot that reads colour tiles like instructions. Here’s what your child gets their hands on, in plain English.
A small, palm-sized robot with a colour sensor on its underside. No screens. No app needed. The children place coloured tiles on the floor, and Indi drives over them — doing exactly what each colour tells it to do.
Indi is the prop. The real lesson is the way children start to think. They leave the workshop with the same six big ideas every computer scientist uses — and you can practise every one of them at home with no robot at all.
The good news for home: you don’t need an Indi to keep this going. Below are six unplugged games — one for each big idea — that work with paper, a sibling, and a kitchen table.
One game for each of the six big ideas your child meets in the workshop. All you need is paper, a pencil, and someone to play with. Pick one, do it once, come back to it next week.
Your child gives you exact, step-by-step instructions to make a jam sandwich. You do only what they say, literally. Forget to say "open the jar"? You’ll be holding it shut, looking confused.
Why it works: hilarious for the family, brilliant for the brain. Children learn that computers do exactly what you tell them — in exactly the order you tell them.
Read out a familiar set of instructions — a recipe, brushing teeth, getting ready for school — with one instruction in the wrong place. ("Put toothpaste on the brush. Rinse mouth. Brush teeth.") Who can spot the bug first?
Why it works: debugging is just spotting the mistake. The most useful word in coding is "why?" — and this game makes "why?" feel like a sport.
Make three paper planes. Throw plane 1. Note how far it went. Change one thing about plane 2 (wing angle, paper weight, fold count). Throw it. Did it go further? Change one thing for plane 3.
Why it works: this is the scientific method and the engineering loop. Real coders never get it right first try. They get a bit closer each go.
Five minutes, walking to school. Can your child spot three patterns in the world around them? Brick walls. Railings. Roof tiles. Crossing stripes. The buttons on a keypad. Patterns are everywhere once you start looking.
Why it works: pattern recognition is the master coder’s skill. Children get sharp at this surprisingly fast — and it leaks into maths, reading, and music.
A friendly alien has landed in your kitchen. They’ve never brushed their teeth. Can your child write the instructions — in ten steps or fewer — for the alien to brush its teeth correctly? Read it out. Mime the alien doing it.
Why it works: big task ("brush teeth") becomes small steps ("pick up brush, turn tap on, wet brush…"). This is abstraction, the master skill of computer science.
"Walk me through your journey to school. Start with leaving the house. End with sitting at your desk." Every step. Out loud. If you cross at the lights, then you turn left…
Why it works: "pseudocode" is just words before symbols — the way every coder plans a programme. Saying the steps out loud trains the same muscle children use to code at school.
A one-page treasure hunt your child can do over the week. Six coding missions, all unplugged. Tick them off as they go.
Six missions. Six big ideas. No screens needed. Do one a day, or all of them on a rainy Saturday. Tick each one when it’s done.
Get a grown-up to make you a sandwich — but they can only do exactly what you say. Write your instructions:
Here are the steps for making a sandwich — but one is in the wrong place. Circle the bug:
Make three paper planes. Throw each one. Change one thing each time. How far did they fly?
What did you change?
Find five patterns. Tick each one when you spot it:
A friendly alien has landed in your kitchen. Teach it how to brush its teeth in 10 steps:
Tell the story of your journey to school. Use IF and THEN at least once. (Like: IF it’s raining, THEN I put on my wellies.)
You’ve thought like a coder all week. Show this to your teacher — you just used the same six big ideas every computer scientist uses.
You don’t need to know any code yourself. You just need these four adjustments to how you talk about it — and your child will out-code you within a week.
"I think if I do this next… let’s see what happens." Out-loud reasoning teaches the habit faster than any instruction.
When something goes wrong, smile. "Oh interesting — what happened?" Bugs are how learning happens. Don’t skip past them.
It is so tempting to "just fix it." Don’t. Watching your child find the bug themselves builds the skill that lasts for life.
Not "well done you got it right" — rather "well done you noticed that and changed it." Praise the iteration, not the answer.
Coding lessons don’t end at the school gate. Six questions you can ask on the walk home, at dinner, or at bedtime — to keep the computational-thinking muscle warm.
If a robot only does what you tell it — whose fault is it when something goes wrong?
What’s something at home that gives you instructions in a certain order — a recipe, a board game, a school morning?
Tell me about a time today when something didn’t work first try. What did you do next?
If you could give one instruction to every person on Earth for an hour, what would it be? And what might go wrong?
Can you think of something a robot would be really useful for in real life? And something a robot should never do?
What’s the smallest change you could make to your bedtime routine that would make tomorrow better?
Solve Real Problems — the bigger Future Skill behind this workshop — is one of the 12 skills on the Spark2 Future Skills Passport. We’re building a free at-home pack for every one. Get the next pack as soon as it’s ready.
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