Kid power: Kano adds camera, pixel, and speaker kits to DIY PC

“Oh my gosh, this computer actually works!” exclaimed a nine-year-old boy when he booted up the Kano PC he’d just built himself. He’d been skeptical. This was not like the sleek, closed devices the boy has at home and at school; he had handled and assembled the actual components of this computer himself. Suddenly, motherboard, memory card, and the HDMI cable were no longer abstract objects.

Kano is on a simple mission to make coding fun for young kids — like the boy in this story — and today, the company announced the addition of camera, pixel and speaker kits to its DIY PC, as well as Kano code, a free, open-source coding tool. “We asked ourselves, what if we could physicalize more of the cool things that kids want to do with coding?” CEO and cofounder Alex Klein told VentureBeat. “These additions help digital computing transfer into the physical world and back again.”