Learning Bytes

Right now, I'm working on this educational toy I came up with called Learning Bytes, which is a children's toy designed to let children focus on gathering and using information. More concretely, it's a set of blocks which plug together. Currrently, it includes motor blocks, speaker blocks, light sensor blocks, a knob block, and a display block. The light sensor block will output a value corresponding to the intensity of light that it sees. If you plug it into the motor block, the motor will spin faster as the light intensity increases, or if you plug it into the speaker block, the speaker will output a higher frequency with higher intensities. The underlying idea here is that you're just focusing on the information each block can gather or use, and the toy provides an abstraction barrier so that you can just plug the blocks together and not worry about how the information gets converted and transferred.

In the finished toy, there will be 3 different levels you can use it on, each level breaking an abstraction layer. The first level is the simplest, where you plug blocks together and make systems using the capabilities the blocks have, out of the box. The second level breaks the "block" abstraction barrier, and enables you to change the behavior of a block by writing code for it in a "block language" (similar to the lego mindstorms programming environment) on a computer, and then downloading the code to the block. Here, you can have individual blocks perform some basic logic functions, and you overcome the limitations of the out-of-the-box system.

The final level breaks the abstraction barrier of the original electronics, by providing you with a Custom block to which you could add different sensors or use it to interface to other items in your home (you could put entry sensors on doors, a button when someone sits in a chair, etc)

you might notice the detail goes down as a describe the higher levels--that's because I haven't built them yet, so I'm not exactly sure how they'll work.