Did you know that even young adults use UBot Studio? We’ve always said it’s simple enough for children, but powerful enough for programmers, and we’ve actually heard stories of both: programmers who use it to quickly build incredible automation applications, and customers who buy UBot Studio for their teenagers to use (some of those teenagers have even had successful product launches).
UBot Studio’s diverse user base always make us proud, even though we don’t talk about it much. But this is a story we wanted to share with everyone.
A few years ago we began working with a primary school in Belgium, which uses UBot Studio once a week in a class with students between 12 and 14 years old. UBot Studio is first used on a projector in the classroom to show how you can easily make software to automate processes, and to explain how to understand the structure of web pages. And at a more basic level, it helps the students understand logic.
An image from the school’s brochure
They start with scripts that have been prebuilt, with explanations of why they work: “We provide them with simple scripts like scraping a field and filling it with content. Explaining these scripts helps them to create their own scripts.”
Then, they use the drag-and-drop GUI to build their own scripts. Using UBot Studio helps them both understand the functionality of the backend of the website, as well as how an automation tool interacts with it. Or as a school associate told us, it “gives the students the opportunity to program their DOM structures and understand it in another way by ‘using’ the DOM structure.” The DOM – for those of you who don’t know – is the logical structure of a document (like a webpage). It’s like how the computer “understands” the webpage, and it stands for Document Object Model. When you click on an element inside UBot Studio, in the background, UBot Studio is referencing it based on how it’s described in the DOM. (See more info here.)
And ultimately, it helps the kids learn to program:
By programming website projects they have to automate their form subscriptions, get external data from other websites (intranet) and place it into their web application…[this makes] the students think abstractly… knowing the outcome of their actions before they start. Automation is the perfect way to think that way because you have a goal to reach from the start without knowing how to get it done.
UBot Studio “let the students see why DOM structures are very important in online development, learning to work and interpret the structure and what you can do with it by automating things with UBot Studio.”
By the end, they learn a lot about website backends, and more than a little bit about how to program. And if you’ve ever played with Legos, you will appreciate this. We asked if the kids really understand that they’re programming as they’re building scripts with UBot Studio:
They don’t realize they are programming. We explain UBot as a box of Legos. Each piece has it’s function in the program to achieve their goal. Chaining is key for combining functionalities – so they learn logical thinking along the way.
We’ve always thought about UBot Studio a little bit like Legos, too!
Do you have a story about learning to program with UBot Studio? Share it!
