New Raspberry Pi kit for kids aims at teaching them to code

In the late 1980s a select group of British teens were given (or saved up their pocket money to buy) a small, rubber-keyed home PC called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. My brother was one of them. And that little box, with its blank canvas start screen that prompted you to try out a few lines of code (Spectrum Basic), set him on the road to becoming a fully fledged programmer.
Fast forward to today, and the machines kids get to play with — the iPads and iPod Touches — don’t actively encouraging that sort of computing. They’re slick, sealed boxes, with UIs that deliberately conceal complexity so they can wow with effortless capability. They’re designed to please (to ‘delight’ in Applespeak), not to make you curious. And that’s an important difference.
The disconnect between the creative platforms of the past, and the slick, hermetically sealed boxes of today was the trigger for the U.K.-made Raspberry Pi microcomputer to be created by a group of Cambridge engineers. And just yesterday the Pi Foundation announced it has shipped its two millionth board.
It’s also the impetus behind a new platform, part-inspired by and built on top of the Pi, called Kano (pictured above, and in kit form below). What exactly is Kano? It’s a build-it-yourself computer launching today on Kickstarter with the aim of pulling in $100,000 in crowdbacking to get 1,000 of its Kano kits to market by summer 2014.