Recently a few tangible programming products (e.g. Cubetto, Littlebits) have come to market that help kids learn to code.

So how could we help developers and designers create even more of them?

The issue is that for most designers, the technical and financial barriers are still too high to create these products – holding back the widespread innovation and adoption of tangible programming products in education.

They have to build them from scratch each time, with single-purpose, proprietary, and often expensive designs that can’t communicate with one another.

Put simply: they’re wasting time and money developing the technical infrastructure, instead of innovating and developing educational design.

So we set out to make sure they didn’t have to, by creating a versatile and open hardware and software platform any designer could use to create tangible programming products. So they can invent new and creative ways for children to learn to code.

The Bloks platform is a modular platform that has three main components:

Pucks: tiles that can be programmed with different instructions (e.g. turn on/off, move left, jump, play music). They can have different forms and interactivity.

Base Boards: modular blocks that house the pucks. Putting them together in different configurations can create different sets of instructions.

Brain Board: a single block that connects to the Base Boards. It reads their instructions and executes that program. It also provides power and connectivity.

The platform has three core characteristics. It’s:

Versatile (the Base/Brain Boards’ open-frame electronics give creators freedom to experiment with form factors)

Extensible (Base Boards and pucks allow for a wide variation in what can be created and expressed with the system)

Open (open software API allows it to be connected to any other computing device over WiFi and Bluetooth enabling the Bloks system to be controller of that device).

Using products built with the Bloks platform, kids ‘hack the world around them’ and develop computational thinking by programming the things that they love.

We launched the platform at ISTE in June 2016 - recognized globally as the most comprehensive educational technology conference in the world.

Since announcement there have been 30,000 registrations of interest in the project from educators, toy manufacturers, makers and parents. The project also generated global interest, resulting in more than 600 international press articles and 750,000 views of the project's announcement videos.