Ending the week without a list of new ways to blow your paycheck just feels wrong, so welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly roundup of the coolest toys we’ve seen on the internet. This week we’ve got some Star Wars-themed costume ideas that will unintentionally terrify your neighborhood, a fun Squirrel Girl doll…
For almost seven years now, littleBits has been cleverly getting kids to learn about tech with programmable electronic building blocks that make anyone an instant hardware hacker. Its latest kit also promises to turn kids into superheroes like Iron Man, but its real appeal is instead making you feel like Tony Stark as…
Released ahead of The Last Jedi, littleBits’ Droid Inventor Kit let aspiring Jedis build and customize their own astromech droids—even if they didn’t have the Force. The company’s new Avengers Hero Inventor Kit takes a similar DIY approach, but instead of robotic sidekicks, kids can design and program their own…
Kano’s first product was a computer that kids could build as easily as a Lego set, helping to demystify the technologies we obsess over. The company’s next product is a buildable, motion-sensing wand that swaps spells for simple programming making it easy for kids to conjure up magical interactions with a flick of the…
Did you know that Ivanka Trump is an expert on education policy? Well, the president’s daughter wants you to know that she is, especially when it comes to “tech.” The 35-year-old former fashion designer outlined her grand plan for the future of technology education in a New York Post column on Thursday.
On Monday, Trump signed a memorandum to ramp up education initiatives in STEM education and computer science, and on Tuesday, Ivanka joined a panel discussing the over $300 million that tech companies have just pledged to K-12 computer science programs in the US. “Computer science and coding are a priority for the…
Welcome back to another week of Toy Aisle, io9's collection of the most amazing Paul Reiser merchandise (and maybe other things) we’ve seen on the internet this week. We’ve got Black Panther and the Ultimate Spider-Man himself swinging into action, even more SDCC exclusives, and a very fancy Transformer.
The hallways of math and science history are overflowing with the achievements of white men, from Sir Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs; their faces are printed into elementary school textbooks everywhere, and their achievements have been indelibly drilled into our minds, with countless awards and institutions named after…
Hot on the heels of Hidden Figures’ recent Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture, Lego has just revealed the next fan-designed set it’s officially putting into production, and it also celebrates women who have played key roles in the history of the US space program.
First, it beat Star Wars: Rogue One. Now, for the second weekend since its wide-release debut, Hidden Figures—the true story of three black female mathematicians at NASA—is number one at the box office. It’s raked in roughly $6o million so far, and counting.
Hidden Figures tells a kind of story that has become overly familiar—how black individuals managed to achieve in a system built to oppress them—but does it in a different way.
On Monday, 37 top scientists signed a letter to President-elect Donald Trump imploring him to keep the Iran nuclear deal intact. The pact, said the group—which includes Nobel laureates, various nuclear experts, and the president of the Federation of American Scientists—is a “critical U.S. strategic asset.”
Have you ever wondered how the largest ships in the world are able to cross Panama as they make their way from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic? The locks system in the Panama Canal are a modern engineering marvel, and how they work is now cleverly explained through this new Lego Education set.
Giving a soldering iron to a ten year old to teach them about electronics maybe isn’t the best idea. littleBits, on the other hand, turn basic electronic components into magnetic building blocks that make it easy and safe for kids to build circuits. And now that it includes Bluetooth, those custom creations can…
Lunella Lafayette. Reed Richards. Peter Parker. Tony Stark. Amadeus Cho. Hank Pym. Some of Marvel Comics’ biggest names are scientists and engineers as well as superpowered heroes. To celebrate, Marvel is having a month of STEM-themed covers to promote science education... and a little bit of the arts too, course.
Every company wants kids to build stuff—not in an illegal child labor kind of way but in a fun, educational kind of way. Ball robots are teaching kids code and Google’s new modular blocks work toward a similar goal. But Bose’s BOSEbuild speaker is more interested in teaching the ins and outs of sound and speaker…
Between Android and iOS there are now over four million apps available for mobile devices, so there’s no denying that more and more, programming is becoming a useful skill. You don’t need to head back to school to learn to code, though, because a programmable remote control ball makes the process so much more…
Randall Monroe’s XKCD does a stellar job of explaining scientific concepts while also making people laugh. So, it makes a surprising amount of sense for those comics to find their way into high school textbooks.
Captain America may get all the glory when it comes to saving the fictional world of the Marvel Universe, but our real world desperately needs saving too. And it’s going to require more than an indestructible shield. To save our planet, we’re going to need science.
The wooden laser-cut dinosaur skeleton is a staple of most museum and science center gift shops. But a company called UGEARS has turned those wooden puzzles into engineering marvels with more gears and moving parts than a Swiss watch.
