Eedu – Backerjack

The SBrick Plus hides STEM education inside toy bricks

As a child, there’s not much better than having a full set of Legos to go to town on. As adults, there isn’t much out there as fondly remembered as the classic building blocks. Now, with the explosion of IoT technology, the SBrick Plus take clicking together plastic bricks up a notch.

The sequel to the successfully funded SBrick back in 2014, the SBrick Plus is a Bluetooth-enabled brick placed into Lego models to control them remotely using a smart device like a phone, tablet, gamepad or PC. What’s more, the SBrick Plus uses sensors from the WeDo 1.0 family that can be programmed in several languages and track variables like tilt and proximity for fun uses in model planes, for example. What the SBrick really allows for are dynamic educational experiences in the home and in the classroom, something the team behind the product facilitates with a series of lessons designed to teach the fundamentals of programming and robotics.

Eedu educational kit lets you roll your own drone

The military, commercial, and extreme sport applications of drone technology have dominated news headlines and drone feature sets for the past few years. As such, this versatile technology’s reputation has been reduced to either a war machine or a camera with wings.

Skyworks Aerial Systems gives people a chance to explore all sorts of drone possibilities with its Eedu drone assembly kit. Contained inside the Eedu kit are all the tools and parts necessary to put it together, so new users can assemble and start programming quickly while more intrepid users can opt to install their own hardware. While the drone is compatible with a wide array of open source hardware, it isn’t necessary to use them. The company’s Intel Edison-powered LUCI drone controller has all the hardware and sensors to act as its brains and still be open to expansion for more varied use.