![]() My son has seen plenty of keyboards, cables and Pis and they haven’t held much interest for him. He agreed and the Kano was going to face it’s first major test. A smart teacher knows that kids need to have fun with the “education” payload carefully and seamlessly inserted in appropriate doses.Īt the weekend I sat down with my son and decided to open the kit. He doesn’t want to compile the Linux kernel. If I started with the command line he would be scarred for life and more likely to associate computers with watching paint dry. He wants to experience success and copying lots of text from a worksheet doesn’t do it. Older children have got the patience to find the command line interesting and certainly need to gain a wider set of skills but my 8 year old finds lots of typing boring. First Steps With KanoĪnyone who has ever tried teaching a child knows that keeping their attention and engaging them is critical. I like the 80s as much as the next guy but assuming it is the only path to computer enlightenment is like assuming you can only become a doctor if you grow your own leeches. They felt that dropping the child gently into a colourful desktop environment was depriving them of the glory days of the 1980s and kids were better off being forced to use the command line. ![]() The third thing that people had a problem with was abstraction. The way you present these items to children is critical and as my son worked through the booklets I started to see where Kano beat anything I could have put in front of him. However Kano is far more than the Pi, case, cables and keyboard. If you can get by with a carrier bag of generic eBay bits then fine … congratulations. This is true if you ignore all the additional value that the Kano experience offers. Some complained the kit was too expensive and people could create their own for half the price. This was always a strange reason for not liking it as the Raspberry Pi Foundation had always made it clear they wanted companies to create products based around the Pi. This seemed to be mainly based on the perception that Kano was attempting to create a commercial product based on the success of the Raspberry Pi. I remember when Kano first appeared on the Raspberry Pi scene and it was met with a luke warm reception by some in the community. I got the kit for free but the opinions and thoughts in this article are mine or based on those of my son. Under normal circumstances I would struggle to review this sort of product but I’ve got access to a small human child so decided this would make for a much more interesting test. Kano contacted me and asked if I wanted to take a look at the kit after the recent launch of the Pi 3. In the UK the current price for the standard kit is £119.99 from the Kano site. It comprises of a kit of parts which can be used with a set of software activities. ![]() Kano is a Raspberry Pi based computer kit aimed at children and was launched on Kickstarter in 2013.
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