The Wall Street Journal Reviews Kano, MOSS, and Little Bits

I posted this at Facebook (remember when Facebook had a character limit for status updates? That so didn't work for me). And then thought I might as well post it here as well.

I wrote a long review of MOSS Robotics back in July.

Here's the Wall Street Journal Article, Tech Toys to Make Children Smarter, which is a terrible title.

And here are my comments on it:

The Wall Street Journal reviews Kano, MOSS Robotics, and Little Bits. Because of the kind of person I am, we have all three of these things.

I'd add, or emphasize, that Kano is beautifully designed, and putting it together and following the on-screen animations to set it up is amazing. Once it's together, though, it's got a processor that is slower than anything the children of the 21st century have ever encountered before, leading to multiple instances of us sitting around wondering if it's crashed while waiting for it to load a webpage or finish a process. The Tiny Tornado loved the idea of having his own computer, but switches to a device with a faster processor whenever he has the chance, and now hasn't fired up his Kano for awhile. I suspect the market for Kano is families like ours, that have access to other computers and buy this low-cost computer kit to enhance their kids' experience, which makes me think TT's story isn't unique. If you had a kid very committed to programming already, Kano might work great for them. But there are a lot of programming resources that are awesome, cheaper or free, and run on a tablet or the computer you've already got.

The kids in the review had the same problem we had with MOSS Robotics: the instructions are very difficult to follow, and the robots fall apart. All the time. Over and over and over again.

Finally, when they tried Little Bits, they got to a problem I think is pretty well ubiquitous with these kinds of toys and gadgets: to really unlock the power, users need to start thinking independently, trying their own ideas, using them not as a kit with instructions to be followed but as a tool for making their own creations. But not everybody's minds work like that, and a lot of kids need plenty of guidance to make the change. As much as these things market themselves as easy-to-use, they really have a heck of a learning curve.