A team of industrial designers is aiming to turn "programming into play" with a hackable ball that lets kids invent their own games. "Hackaball is a tough, responsive, programmable ball that pairs with an iPad app," explains William Owen, from innovation consultants Made by Many. "We took inspiration from one of the oldest play objects -- the ball -- and looked at how else it could be played with."
Inside, there's a gyro, an accelerometer, a vibration motor, nine LEDs, a rechargeable battery, some memory and a speaker.
That's all encased in a shock-absorbent housing, and can be programmed over Bluetooth using an iPad.
The goal was to make that programming process accessible. "Feedback from hundreds of children has helped us created an interface that is fun, simple and intuitive for kids," says Owen. "We've gone for an easy to use visual programming interface that helps kids hack Hackaball to do what they want and play instantly by swapping around different icons and colours, with immediate response from the ball."
Those responses could be vibration, lighting displays or a library of sound effects that includes a "robotic fart". "We wanted to make software programming a function of visual rather than verbal intelligence," explains Owen, "so that it becomes a simple introduction to programming logic for even the youngest children who might not yet be reading fluently."
Jon Marshall from industrial design firm Map added that getting it all into something you could throw around was tough. "It required a huge amount of technical experimentation to create a shockproof design for the inner-core module. There was also a lot of material experimentation to get the right amount of squash and bounce into the ball and sleeve design but retain the ability for users to open up the ball and see the inner working, and for charging the battery."
To get Hackaball into production, the team is looking for $100,000 (£65,000) on Kickstarter. "We've already done much of the groundwork iterating through different software, PCB and ball designs with numerous prototypes that we've tested with children," says Owen. "These have been specced out and costed with our manufacturer. The funding will be used to take us to the next stage and will be used to further develop the iPad app, firmware, tooling and manufacturing costs so we can ship Hackaballs worldwide."
If all goes well, the Hackaballs will be arriving in time for Christmas and cost $69 (£45). "We're trying to turn around ingrained attitudes to computing -- make it something you can chuck around, tough and beautiful, not fragile -- and something much more everyday," says Owen. "It's something children can do by themselves and without instruction -- and along the way they get to see how technology works and how to hack it to make it their own."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
