As Gupta talks, Dash plays “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on a xylophone accessory. When I call Dash by name, it quirks its head up at me and utters another captivating burble. My iPad Mini is both a remote control and a programming interface. The possibilities, I realize, are endless.

Just in time for the holiday season, the first production-ready versions of Dash and Dot are shipping out to developers and the thousands of Wonder Workshop backers who contributed to a crowdfunding effort to get the company started. (You can also purchase the robots and their accessories directly from the company’s website.) The prospect makes me feel regret that my kids are already mostly grown up. Because even though the politics of coding education are a little murky — we should probably make sure every kid learns to read and write and multiply before we worry about coding lessons — it’s impossible to miss the point Gupta and Dash are trying to make. Code is everywhere around us, as essential to and determinative of our daily lives as electricity or oxygen. The better we understand this, the better equipped we will be to make our way forward.

When Gupta was a teenager in the North Indian city of Chandigarh in the late 1980s, his high school had only two PCs. As Gupta remembers it, the computers weren’t connected to a network of any kind.

“There were only two things you could do with them, play games or code,” he says.

When he tired of gaming, he started teaching himself BASIC, with a determination so obsessive that his principal soon gave him a key to the school, and told him to come in any time he wanted.

“I never felt like I had a special ability,” says Gupta. “I wasn’t good at sports. But once I learned to code I could now do things that other kids couldn’t. To me, that felt like a superpower.”

Vikas Gupta

And when you look at Gupta’s life trajectory, the word “superpower” doesn’t seem all that out of place. Being able to code propelled Gupta down a road leading from Chandigarh to the United States. After a stint at Amazon working on the company’s payment systems, he started his own company, which he then promptly sold to Google. Now he runs another startup, making toy robots. It’s a story that is both typical and amazing. Typical because Silicon Valley is packed with immigrants from all over the world who realized that mastering code was the key to upward mobility. There are Guptas everywhere you look. But also amazing because the resulting concentration of talent and wealth in one relatively small geographic area is breathtaking.

Wonder Workshop, which has so far raised about 9 million dollars and has only 32 employees, enjoys access to hardware and software capabilities that would have seemed like black magic just a generation ago. The closest I got to a robot when I was a kid was watching one shout “Danger” on the TV show “Lost in Space.” But now I’m looking at a world where you could make an argument that not providing your children with programmable robots to play with will be as bad a parenting sin as neglecting dentist appointments.

Gupta’s first child, a daughter named Mili, was born three years ago. Gupta took the opportunity to quit Google in order spend quality time with his infant and figure out what to do next. Thinking about his child’s future turned out to be the necessary inspiration.

“I started thinking about kids a lot,” says Gupta. “I especially wondered what kinds of products or things or toys she would be growing up with. Would they be the best products I could imagine putting in her hands? iPads and iPhones are very easy to use, and it’s very easy to give devices like that to your child, but all I could see her doing with them was watching videos or consuming media. I didn’t see how these devices would help her be more creative.”

Gupta recalls coming across a news story reporting how Estonia had mandated that first graders start learning how to code. That seemed to him like a pretty young age to get into the digital nitty-gritty, so he began immersing himself in the latest research.

“I found that kids as young as preschool, five, six, seven years old, are capable of grasping basic coding concepts,” says Gupta. “But what’s always missing are tools that make those concepts accessible to them, because, given their attention spans and their motor skills, they’re not very comfortable with keyboards and laptops.” He wanted kids to engage with code in a way that didn’t tether them to screens, which he felt hinders their learning. “They need something that is tangible to play with,” he adds.