We had a little party Thursday afternoon for our local Boulder friends. Happily for us, some brought kids. Amidst a crowded hubbub of geeky grownups Elliott Dobbs (he’s six, with one more month in kindergarten) and Arthur Correll (he’s five and a half) sat there building robots! Right now we have only one Cubelets kit–the all-black engineering prototype that’s in our video–so they had to share, but that worked fine. At first they just snapped blocks together randomly to see what would happen. But pretty soon they began to understand the different functions of each Cubelet and the gradient dataflow model that makes the robots go. With single-minded focus on building robots they worked quietly for over an hour and a half (ignoring the Lego Mindstorms robot and other toys on the table next to them). And for me that was the best part of the party–to see young kids playing with Cubelets entirely entranced.