If You Are A Student Wanting To Adopt The Maker Culture, You Should Get Yourself A Kano

Kano is a simple, compact kit that’s tailor made for students who want to adopt the maker culture. The Kano kit is capable of imparting effective hands-on hardware assembling knowledge as well as programming knowledge to the users.

The best thing about the Kano kit is that the kit is aesthetically very much appealing to the kids and hence, it’s perfectly suitable for children who want to get themselves acclimatized to the maker culture. So basically it can be said that the Kano kit is suitable for users of almost all ages.

In this article, we are going to take a closer look at this DIY (Do-It-Yourself) kit and also see various significant and unique features of the kit. Let’s begin.

Kit components

• Raspberry Pi,

• Small orange wireless keyboard as well as a track pad,

• Transparent case,

• WiFi dongle,

• DIY speaker,

• Instruction book,

• Stencils and stickers,

• 8 GB memory card,

• Cables (A micro-USB power supply, HDMI cable for display)

Assembling the Hardware components of Kano

Like we said before, Kano’s perfect to provide a hands-on hardware assembling knowledge to the users. This might look pretty simple from the hindsight but for a kid, this hands-on experience will surely have a positive experience on a kid.

There’s a specific reason for that.

In this world, almost everything comes in a pre-assembled form. Meaning, if something comes out of the box, it starts working almost immediately (if the product is damaged, that’s a different issue). Kano is a little bit different in this category and we mean that on a positive sense.

The kit comes with an instruction manual which provides users with clear, lucid instructions through which they can put the parts together.

After the assembling is done and dusted, you will have to plug the computer into a screen (it can be any display monitor or a TV) by using the HDMI cable and you’ll be set to go.

The Operating System

Kano OS has a neat and easy look that should be cable of drawing the attention of any beginner or starter. Like we said before, the orange color does have a positive impact on kids who should be attracted enough to come back again and again and never get bored of the same.

Programming

Kano takes a cheerful approach to programming. It uses art, music and games cleverly that are good enough to engage children into the wonders of programming. Users will be able to improvise and experiment with the kit as they see fit.

Kano comes with a number of pre-installed apps and games that are suitable for introducing programming to children:

Pong

Pong is one of the earliest video games developed and incorporated by Atari.

Users will be able to play the same game on Kano. They will also be able to modify specific features of the game such as altering size and speed of the moving ball.

Users will also be able to change rules like speeding up things, constructing an invisible wall etc. All such actions can be done by using the Kano blocks which is a visual drag and drop programming system.

The famous old-school snake game

All of us do remember that old-school small snake in a game that used to gobble up food particles on the screen. It was an integral part of all old Nokia phones.

Players had to control the snake in a way such that it doesn’t collide into any obstacles.

The users will be able to customize specific features like adding multiple “lives”, decreasing or increasing the speed etc.

Other significant features include:

• Minecraft,

• Kano Draw.

Other applications

Kano provides users with a “Chromium” web browser. You can use the web browser to check e-mails, browse you tube and do many other things.

There’s a separate video player as well that you can use to watch movies, videos etc. A text editor is there as well. Other important applications include calculator and paint.

Kano World is the on-line marketplace from where the users can download apps like Lifeograph, LibreOffice and many other games.

ake a peek at this video to know about the ways through which you can work with Kano.

The detailed specifications and the price of Kano can be found here.

Most of the people these days know about several ways through which technology can be used effectively and easily. But what about comprehending it? Programming has become the basic technological literacy. It’s therefore necessary for beginners to get accustomed to the wonders of programming from an early age. Kano is therefore perfect for young kids to get into programming.

So get a Kano and build, learn, play and have fun at the same time.