In my adventures with Swift programming, I mentioned the R2-D2 toy/gadget that you can bring home and programme yourself. When I wrote about it, it was a delicious want rather than a need, but somehow over the course of a sunny few days off, I ended up with the very same Artoo bluetoothing himself to my iPad.

I’ve only been playing for a little while but first impressions are: This is the cutest thing ever! It bleeps and bloops, the tripod wheel comes in and out and it whizzes around making that scream noise that R2-D2 is so famous for. You can control it via a Sphero app, which makes it more of a remote control style toy, or you can actually sit down and programme it.

The Sphero team have created a Swift Playgrounds book to guide you through an adventure with R2, but I find it slightly more advanced from where I am, and the teaching is somewhat lacking. It’s more encouraging of a “just keep trying and see what happens, and we’ll give you hints as we go” rather than teaching you what on earth you’re supposed to be doing in the first place.

Apparently, you can also get these app-enabled droids to react when you play any of the Star Wars movies. I haven’t managed to get that functioning yet, but I’m also not sure that’s a bad thing. Apparently if you have more than one, they will actually interact with each other while the feature film plays out. That seems a sure fire way of never getting anything done again.

But no matter. R2 is cute, and I love it, and it’s a motivational tool to keep learning, because programming the little droid to spin his dome left and right and keep scanning for stormtroopers seems like the kind of business that could save the entire galaxy. Am I right?