In November 2017 we officially started Micromelon Robotics in Brisbane. The plan was to build robotics tools designed for the classroom from the ground up. Something teachers could pull out of a box and have working from day one, and that students could grow with from primary school through to senior secondary.
We'd come out of UQ engineering excited about the potential of robotics to bring coding to life. There were some great hobbyist platforms around, but classrooms have a different set of needs: gear that's robust enough for everyday use, software that scales from drag-and-drop blocks to Python without switching tools, and resources that fit into a real teaching plan. That's what we set out to build.
So we got started on two things at once: the Micromelon Rover, and the Code Editor. We knew we wanted them to feel like one product. A single environment where a Year 4 student writing their first program and a Year 12 student working in Python could both feel right at home. Both pieces took time to get right, but Brisbane was the perfect place to do it. We had UQ on our doorstep, a supportive local startup community, and a growing network of teachers happy to test our work and tell us where we could do better.
That's how Micromelon started, and it's still the same idea driving us today.