BirdBrain Technologies, a Pittsburgh startup that commercializes projects developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, will loan 1,000 of its Finch robots to school districts or educational groups during Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), Dec. 8-14.

“We want to support Computer Science Education Week’s Hour of Code initiative, which seeks to demystify computer code with a one-hour introductory activity for 10 million students,” said Tom Lauwers, a Ph.D. graduate of the Robotics Institute and the founder of BirdBrain. “Finch was developed at the Robotics Institute specifically to make computer programming more compelling for novices, so we want to make the robots available to as many students as possible that week.”

BirdBrain will loan the robots to up to 20 school districts or educational organizations.