Just under a year ago I stumbled across an exciting new venture on Kickstarter: Kano - A computer anyone can make. With three young kids, and the vague unease that without a Raspberry Pi in my pocket I could hardly call myself an IT guy, I sensed an opportunity and signed up. I wasn't alone; the project reached its $100,000 funding goal in less than 18 hours and topped out at over $1.5mn. Way to go guys!
Over the last nine months the Kano team have beavered away and kept their backers (I'm just one of many) in the loop - as any good start-up should - and they've just come good on their initial promise. This week I finally received my smart orange box and it's no exaggeration to say that I could barely contain myself.
Let the unboxing begin:
The only problem was that I mentioned to my son Joshua that this was 'his' computer. So he took control from the start by picking up Book 1, the make a computer instructions, and ordered me to pass him components as and when he needed them! For this to even be possible tells me that Kano have done a fantastic job with their clear, concise and colour-coded guide. This kit is a dream to assemble and in less than 15 minutes we were up and running:
I really can't over-state just how amazing this is. My son loves computers (don't they all?) but he's never tinkered with one and has only seen the internals when I've undertaken a destructive dissection of some failed device. So for Kano to create a package that makes success feel not just easy but inevitable? Well I take my hat off to them.
Of course when we adults assemble "real" computers, such as desktops, the hardware is the easy bit; the real pain comes with software installation, driver updating, configuration and all of the other t-crossing and i-dotting required to create a stable system. So the elephant in the room was whether Joshua could boot and configure his new toy without the standard angst.
What do you think?
Within perhaps another 15 minutes Joshua had initialised the Kano, connected to our local wi-fi network, been amazed by the fact that his computer just worked and kicked-off the auto-update process. Okay it's fair to say that setting up a standard Pi from scratch isn't that difficult for someone half-competent but the Kano kit sure does diminish the time it takes to go from a box of bits to a system that's fun to use.
However if you drill into the Kano ethos a bit further you realise that this was, always, meant to be merely a jumping-off point. What the founders really hoped was make programming and hacking just as simple and intuitive as something like, well, Lego. You don't need a tutor to show you how to snap plastic bricks together and you don't really need one to tell you that connecting Kano blocks together makes fun things possible.
A few days later Joshua is happily hacking Minecraft (perhaps his favourite game ever) and forcing the cuboid world to do his bidding. There's nothing quite like building an infinite tower of floating lava with just a few mouse-clicks to capture his attention. In an ideal world Kano would come with the very latest version of Minecraft, whatever that is, but still the possibilities here are immense:
That said there are, as you might imagine, a few teething troubles to endure. Initially we plugged the Kano directly into a HDMI-enabled television and while this broadly worked the screen did overscan off the side and this made reading instructions difficult! When the Kano OS is running you can manually shrink the screen to fit and this provides a partial solution. However I've had to unearth an old flat-panel display to really enjoy a system where the windows open with a sensible and usable aspect-ratio and resolution.
The other more troublesome problem is that we can't change our wi-fi configuration. Luckily a direct Ethernet connection works (and I happen to have a cable handy!) and we can update the Kano effectively. Still the root cause of the problem is unclear and a full update of the OS hasn't resolved it. This is a bug in progress.
So there are some situations where Joshua hit a wall and required my help but the simple fact remains: the Kano team have put together an awesome package that deserves to open doors for kids around the world. They say charity begins at home and we certainly have a very happy contributor here:
Next stop: open up the Kano "code powers" book and unleash the magic...