PicoCricket Kit is designed for making artistic creations with lights, sound, music, and motion.
The set includes a tiny computer that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, sensors, and other devices and then program them to react, interact, and communicate.
PicoCricket can be user in many different types of projects: to sound an alarm when the lights go off or when voices get loud, interactive house, musical instrument, an interactive garden, a cat that purrs when someone pets it, birthday cake and program it to play a song when someone blows out the candles etc..
The kit contains four sensors (light, sound, touch, and resistance), five output devices (motor, sound box, numeric display, and two multi-colored lights), easy-to-use PicoBlocks software for programming the Cricket, a beamer for transmitting programs to the Cricket, a collection of LEGO bricks, craft materials (including felt, pipe cleaners, and pom-poms). Besides all the parts, the kit includes illustrated building guides but little more in terms of instructions.
The kids can build the toy themselves and at the same time learn and explore these concepts behind sensors, robots, and automation.
Programming:
The PicoBlocks is a point-and-click, drop- and-drag programming language that makes programming simple and intuitive. You just arrange and combine colored puzzle pieces on a computer screen with a mouse into simple or complex programs. Next you send your program via a USB cable to a detachable beamer. Finally you put the beamer close to the cricket, push of a button and the beamer delivers the cricket a new set of instructions. Motors and sensors that are plugged into the Cricket will perform according to the programming stored in its solid state memory.
