American educational robotics company Dexter Industries has been acquired by fellow American robotics company Modular Robotics. Dexter Industries, the company behind the excellent Raspberry Pi-based GoPiGo and the micro:bit-based Gigglebot as well as several others was merged into Modular Robotics back in July. Since then, they’ve been integrating their operations. Modular Robotics, based in Boulder, Colorado, make Cubelets – a fantastic way to get your kids into physical computing and robotics. You start off without a screen, assembling the blocks together, before moving on to using Blockly to program more advanced behaviour.

For now, both product lines are expected to continue, which is very welcome news for this blogger – the GoPiGo in particular is a brilliant robotics kit and the visual programming environment/software that goes with it (Bloxter) is first-rate, providing a user-friendly interface to help get you started with programming your robot. I reviewed the kit and the software a couple of years ago and it’s a great starting point.

It will be interesting to see how things progress as the companies innovate and work together to create new, exciting ways of encouraging kids of all ages to get into robotics.