Inspiring kids with robots, technology, and games

Last month, hundreds of parents and children attended the 5^th annual Tech Open House for Kids hosted by Amazon Women in Engineering. The event featured Amazon teams' booths and demos, with the goal to inspire and educate children about technology. This year, over 700 parents and kids enjoyed the 17 demos and giveaways from Amazon teams as well as external STEM programs.

The event was a success thanks to the 13 participating Amazon teams: Campus, Amazon Instant Video, Lumberyard, Treasure Truck, Goodreads, Alexa Communications, Alexa Smart Home, IMDb, Kindle Reader Education, Amazon Rapids, A9, Freetime, Redshift Robotics. Attendees were able to get hands-on demos of Amazon products, experience technology driven games, win prizes, and take home giveaways.

Kids were inspired by the Lumberyard team’s two interactive demos, Starter Game and Polly, where kids could play with an interactive AI character. Attendees formed long lines to experience unlocking the Amazon locker to see what surprises were inside and learn about the technology used by the Campus team.

Other demos included playing with Kindle Fire tablets, learning about computer vision solutions for shopping, taking photo and making phone calls with the new Alexa Show.

An added attraction this year was the FIRST Robotics team, an organization that provides robotics competitions for K-12 students, who showcased a few of their award winning robots. The robots navigated around the floor, threw balls in the air, player soccer and drew an attentive crowd. Children were also able to try controlling the robots themselves!