【经典网站】Kano.me:儿童电脑硬件组装开发平台

Kano.me:儿童电脑硬件组装开发平台是一个让孩子们自定义组装的电脑硬件套件开发平台，所有加的电脑组件都是像拼积木一样搭建起来的，在 Kickstarter 上已经筹资超过 100 万美元。

儿童组装电脑，一个简易的手动拼装电脑，Kano 售价 119 美元，是一个可以让孩子们自己拼装的电脑套件，包括了一个 8GB 的 SD 卡、DIY 小喇叭、小键盘等，小主机组装好之后可以连接到显示屏后，孩子还可以学习如何简单地编写贪吃蛇等小游戏，操作系统 Kano OS 的界面就是为孩子们量身定做的。整个产品非常适合 8 到 14 岁的一些对电脑有浓厚兴趣的孩子。

“For young people, you need to make things tangible. You need to feel with your hands the CPU warm up, see the lights turn on, hear the speakers — or this computer science doesn’t feel real. We need to expand beyond the screen.”

So said Alex Klein, co-founder ofKano, Kickstarter’s latest hit project. Kano is a $99 kit (well, now $119 with worldwide shipping) that helps kids build and customize a small computer for coding projects like Pong, Snake and Minecraft. The London-based project has brought in nearly $1 million in preorders and support via Kickstarter, easily exceeding its $100,000 goal within a couple of days.

Kano is preloaded with software and a kid-friendly interface, accompanied by a keyboard built for coding and gaming, and runs on Raspberry Pi, the nonprofit credit-card-sized computer aimed at kids.

The project plays into the growing movement to teach computer science, which includes Code.org and its Hour of Code (which is next week), Girls Who Code, Udacity and many more efforts.

“Using a computer is very different from expressing yourself with computing, and that’s something we’ve sort of locked away,” Klein said.

The people behind Kano had some pretty good tech connections from the start. The original inspiration for the project came from Klein’s 7-year-old nephew Micah, who said he wanted computers to be as simple and fun as Legos, and to be something he could build without someone teaching him to do it.

Micah happens to be the son of Index Ventures partner Saul Klein, Alex Klein’s cousin.

And Index Ventures was among the backers in a $880,000 seed round for the company. (You know, the typical “friends and family” round, with a major venture firm included!)

But now the Kickstarter backing exceeds the seed funding, Alex Klein noted.

Of course, Kano will be pretty limited at the start, and it’s not planning to ship until next summer. It’s likely that after the Kickstarter rush is over, the company will turn its attention to building add-ons, like a robotics kit, Alex Klein said. Other suggestions from the crowd have included a photobooth and a bitcoin miner.

And beyond Micah and the kids from Kickstarter — Alex Klein said the sweet spot is about ages 8 to 14 — Kano has aspirations of bringing its computers to underserved markets around the world.