Education

​Though sets of colorful building bricks made of plastic can usually keep the kids entertained for hours at home, Lego is also used in the classroom. The Lego Foundation and the Lego Group have now unveiled some special bricks aimed at helping blind kids to learn braille through play.​

Lego Education has launched a new STEAM learning package designed to give kids of all abilities more coding confidence. The Spike Prime set includes hundreds of Lego bricks, sensors and motors, a programmable multi-port Hub, and a companion app featuring a block-based coding environment.

​Sphero is probably best known for its BB-8 rolling droid, but has recently been aiming its products at future programmers and makers. The company has opted to take to Kickstarter for its latest bot, which has been designed to be tweaked and hacked by adult hobbyists and young roboticists alike.​

While Sophia the robot is busy on UN business or hanging with Jimmy Fallon, her little sister could soon be teaching kids to code. Meet Little Sophia, a new toy robot that looks like an educational Alexa in an unnerving humanoid body.

We've already seen wooden-bodied electronic devices such as computers, keyboards and video game systems, so why not a quadcopter drone? That's just what SirTeen's Aerowood is, and you put the thing together yourself.

More than 80 percent of people from the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden say they can hold a conversation in English. But that falls to below 60 percent in nearby Germany. What could account for the disparity? TV subtitles, apparently.

Learning coding language basics can be as hard as learning a foreign language. There are many toys aimed at giving future coders a kickstart, and the latest is a trainset from consumer robotics startup Innokind.​

Asus has announced three new Chromebooks that has been ruggedized for students and its first Chrome OS tablet. The Education Series is made up of two 11.6 inch Chromebooks – one a clamshell laptop and the other a convertible – and a 14 inch version, together with a toughened up 9.7 inch tablet.

Toys today include robots, drones and AR, and if you’re lucky you can trick the kids into learning some useful skills along the way. New Atlas rounds up the best tech toys of 2018, which could make for some great last-minute gift ideas for the young’un in your life.

Antsy Labs has introduced its own spin on classic DIY building toys with Pixl, a set of blocks with tiny embedded magnets to keep them stacked in 3D models or lined up in pixelated 2D artworks.

​When we first caught up with BandLab – a cloud-based music creation and collaboration platform – the project was in its infancy. A lot has happened since early 2013, so a catchup is long overdue.​

Many of us carry a smartphone, but few of us know how it works. Croatian tech startup CircuitMess wants to change that with the MakerPhone, a build-it-yourself mobile phone aimed at makers 11 years of age and up.