Interview with Alex Klein

Alex Klein

You Can Do It

We talk with Alex Klein about Kano – a computer anyone can make.

Raspberry Pi Geek: About a year ago, you brought "Kano: A computer anyone can make" to market on Kickstarter. Can you give us a brief overview of what Kano is?

Alex Klein: Kano is a computer that you build and code yourself. It comes as a kit and we think that it is one of the simplest and most fun ways for anyone of any age to get started making technology, understanding the ideas that make computers work, and starting to take control of them to build cool stuff. It is based on the Raspberry Pi, and it is a layer built around the Raspberry Pi, and one of the core goals was to take what we loved about the Raspberry Pi and bring it to more audiences.

We wanted to make it easier for novices to get started and to add, on top, a layer of projects of making and playing to open it up to a wider audience. So partly the Kano kit is a £100 [$150] single-board computer with all the trimmings – WiFi, cables, a DIY speaker, customization projects in the case and, of course, our open source stack based on Debian (well, really Raspbian) called Kano OS. It is also a suite of Levels and apps where you are coding in Minecraft, making music with a Sonic Pi derivation, building a little web project, and drawing with code. Altogether it is what we would describe as a really fun, really simple computer kit designed for all ages all over the world. That is where we began, and this week we just shipped out the first 18,000 units to 87 countries – so we are on the way, but still really at the beginning.

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