Littlebits

littleBits created a system of magnetically connected circuit building blocks. It didn’t do much to teach you about circuit design and electrical engineering, but was intended to abstract signal as a toy and prototyping tool. This let people make experiments with sensors and actuators and dig deeper only if necessary/academically appropriate.

There’s a surprising amount of prior art though. Lectron was a tool from Raytheon in the 60s that encased electronic parts in clear plastic dominoes with magnets to ensure electrical contact when tiled side-by-side. The problem it solved was breadboarding: kids especially could more rapidly cobble together circuits this way, swap out a resistor, change a push button for a potentiometer, etc. The level of abstraction was certainly that of a Radio Shack 30-in-one electronics lab.

What eventually became the “code kit” had its origins in prototyping a game-making tool for a 16x16 LED matrix paired up with an Arduino-compatible microcontroller module. When asked how to expand this into a more general purpose learn-to-code tool, there was a wild amount of research to draw on.

• Scratch (2.0 at the time) was the most popular “computational thinking” tool
• Stagecast Creator was an experiment in defining game logic through demonstrating what you wished the computer to do

Who’s carrying the torch? QUBS have some nice wooden toys that teach something in between assembly and logo turtles.