Teach Your Kids Tech Basics With Electronic Building Blocks

For parents looking for educational toys, a hardware startup developed electronic buildings blocks and a companion augmented reality app that make for an interactive learning experience.

Founded by Tarun Pondicherry and Josh Chan, LightUp magnetic building blocks that can teach anyone about how electronics work.

The interactive blocks are different electronic components, like a battery, light sensor, LED, variable resistor, button, buzzer, wire blocks and more. When snapping together the various magnetic blocks, kids and teens can build projects like a night light and dimmer switch, to more advanced projects like a remote control and a wireless (infrared) transmitter.

SEE ALSO: LEGO-like Toys Help Kids Build Electronics

The companion LightUp App (currently available for Andorid; also for iOS when they ship) incorporates augmented reality to guide you through the actual project you're building with the blocks. Using the smartphone camera, the app recognizes when something isn't working and shows you how to fix it. When the project is working, the app displays how the electricity is flowing — something Pondicherry calls "X-ray vision into circuits."

Because the physical blocks are paired with the power of a smartphone tutor app, it's a fun and useful implementation of augmented reality that people can really use for learning and education in the classroom or at home.

Kids can even experiment with programming hardware via Arduino — an open-source electronics program — beacuse LightUp's microcontroller block is Arduino-compatible,

Pondicherry told Mashable that LightUp's mission is to help make everyone electronic-literate.

"Our goal is to give kids the skills they need so that they can learn the basics of electronics, and after they learn the basics, be enabled to make projects based on the ideas that they have."

LightUp is trying to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter to make the first LightUp kits. With 41 days still left to go in the campaign, backers had pledged more than $26,400, as of Monday morning.

Backers can get various kit sizes, ranging from $39 to $199.

A HAXLR8R Startup

Pondicherry and Chan came up with LightUp after working on projects at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education and with the advice and help of Professor Paulo Blikstein.

The team then developed LightUp's components at hardware startup accelerator HAXLR8R, in Shenzhen, China. HAXLR8R offers seed funding, office space and mentoring for startups building hardware. The accelerator operates between San Francisco and Shenzhen.

For LightUp, the HAXLR8R experience was "tremendously helpful," according to Pondicherry.

"Working in Shenzhen, we were able to meet with manufacturers who could actually make the product," Pondicherry told Mashable.

That's because the accelerator is located in a part of Shenzhen that is an electronics hub, complete with multiple street blocks of component sellers and manufacturers. Pondicherry characterized the location as an "amazing place for hardware development," where they could have in-person conversations with nearby manufacturers.

"Being able to physically visit [manufacturers] when things go wrong and having that constant interaction working with them helped us like a huge deal," he said.

SEE ALSO: How Kickstarter Is Saving Hardware Innovation

Pondicherry also said the HAXLR8R program stood out for its network of mentors they were able to talk with and for the feedback they got from people "in the know."

Other recent HAXLR8R-accelerated startups include Spark Devices (which developed an Arduino-compatible board to add Wi-Fi to practically any project) and Fabule (which created a brainy LED lamp with a personality).

Images courtesy of LightUp