I first met the Ozobots last year, right around this time, at Toy Fair. I thought they were the coolest thing at the show.

What’s an Ozobot? It’s a tiny robot, about the size of a ping-pong ball. You can dress an Ozobot in one of several rubber helmets, and that allows you to tell them apart. (Once you own an Ozobot or two, you will almost certainly want more.)

An Ozobot gets its power through a mini-USB that plugs into its back. Where its left ear might be, there’s a power-on/off button. On the base are two tiny wheels and the most important Ozobot feature: the color sensors.

Ozobot sensors read four colors: black, blue, red and green. Ozobot rides along a color path, sensing the colors below by scanning them. You can draw the path yourself, and Ozobot will respond to your commands.

If you click on the above, you’ll see Ozobot first moving forward, then encountering the blue-red-blue pattern, which is a coded command that instructs Ozobot to flash color blue, then flash color red, then turn 180 degrees.

Ozobot knows lots of commands. Here’s the chart (click to enlarge).

With these commands, you can do all sorts of fun things with Ozobot. Most people probably start, as I did, by drawing lines on papers with the four broad-tipped colored markers, and simply enjoying the ways in which Ozobots follow them. The experience is not unlike watching electric trains in motion (it’s definitely more fun with at least two Ozobots, and even more fun with a whole bunch of the little guys). Of course, electric trains can’t spin around or pretend to be a tornado—so when you add the color signals, as above, Ozobotting becomes a lot more fun than model railroading.

There are plenty of pre-designed Ozobot paths and games now available on the Ozobot website, but that’s just the beginning. For curious kids, Ozobot is a hands-on introduction to computer programming. By employing a limited toolset (four colors in lines and patterns), children quickly come to understand that they can cause Ozobots to obey their commands—and that programming can be a lot of fun.

And then, we move to the tablet. There are several iPad apps — remember that Ozobot reads colors, and there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be able to read them from an iPad screen instead of paper. This makes the Ozobot so much cooler! There are several starter paths that allow you to see how Ozobot responds—and these come with color tools and pre-defined spot combinations that you can place anywhere so that Ozobot moves very slowly, very quickly, and makes other moves. A second app, called Ozogroove, includes digital dance floors, allowing Ozobot to really show off. (What fun!)

Back to the website, there are paths ready for download (to a flat horizontal screen) or paper (which always lies flat). For example, here’s a game called Mazerunner.

Intrigued? Here’s a closer look at an Ozobot:

An Ozobot costs about $50, but I would suggest that you buy a duo set because it’s way more fun to play with two Ozobots than just one. You can buy them directly from the website or from various toy stores listed on the site. I kinda wish they were selling them in sets of three or four, and I hope the prices will go down. Watching a dozen or more of these guys racing around a hand-drawn track, spinning around, speeding up, slowing down, blinking their little colored lights was so much fun at Toy Fair last year, the onesy-twosy experience pales a bit by comparison. But that the for the future. For now, get started with one or two, have fun, and let me know what you think.