Just days after Elecrow launched its Kickstarter campaign for Crowbits on February 24th, the company has already received pledges 3x over its goal of $9,994 thanks to strong community support. But it’s not too late to send in your pledge since there are still 40 days left before the end of the fundraiser. All orders are expected to ship to customers by June 2021.
Following the success of its CrowPi 2 Raspberry Pi Laptop which launched last year, the electronic maker has come out with another fun STEM-based learning product that’s geared toward teaching kids to code as they play. Crowbits has over 80 magnetic blocks that easily snap together to build various projects. It’s packaged as a series of learning kits, from the basic kit aimed for beginners, and progresses to more complex kits that include additional modules and offer more challenging projects for advanced learners.
Each kit has various modules that can be programmed based on their function and are differentiated by size and color.
Crowbits is also designed to seamlessly work with Lego bricks (a most welcome and added bonus for Lego enthusiasts) to extend the creative play, develop building skills and encourage imagination.
Crowbits has five learning kits available: the Hello Kit, Explorer Kit, Inventor Kit, Creator Kit, and Master Kit. The initial kit requires no coding at all. It targets pre-schoolers and focuses mainly on developing critical thinking and building skills. The Explorer, Inventor, and Creator kits provide extra challenges for older kids that want to learn or level up their coding skills and explore more complicated projects.
Capping the series is the Master Kit which teaches kids how to program their own mobile phone, game console, or radar sensor. This kit requires more complex programming and includes a TFT display and an ESP32 board.
Elecrow developed its own customized visual programming tool called Letscode which is based on Scratch 3.0, a drag-and-drop block-based programming software that allows kids to learn to code easily. Crowbits also supports multiple open-source platforms such as Arduino, Micro:bit, and Raspberry Pi. We look forward to reviewing this product in the near future.
