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Don’t buy your kids a camera, let them build one with the Kano Camera Kit

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Sure, digital cameras designed for kids teach basic photography skills, but what about codings skills or DIY photo editing? The Kano Camera Kit is now close to getting in consumers’ hands after a half-million dollar Kickstarter campaign. During the Consumer Electronics Show, Kano shared the latest prototype for the camera kit.

The Kano Camera Kit is a DIY digital camera designed to teach kids well beyond the photo basics, including coding and creative photo manipulation, too. Kano, which is based in London, says the kit is as easy to build as Lego bricks, with detailed guides. After constructing the 5-megapixel camera, kids can code their own photo filters or use code to change the color of the flash. Kids can also use the camera to create GIFs and explore other creative ways to manipulate the image.

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The latest prototype, following the successful Kickstarter campaign, will be shown at CES, the first time the kids tech company has participated in the annual trade show. Attendees can try out the camera on the show floor, while anyone interested in the DIY camera kit can sign up for a new email list to get an alert when the kit is available.

“Our goal is to open up technology, so that anyone can understand and shape it,” said Alex Klein, co-founder and CEO of Kano. “We are thrilled to bring simple, playful, creative computing to CES for the first time.”

The Kano Camera Kit will also be on display with the company’s other coding kits, including a motion sensor and Pixel Kit.

Kano is the company behind the $250 laptop kids can build themselves, a Raspberry Pi-based computer kit that launched last year. Along with the kits to build the actual hardware, the company uses DIY coding kits to program the software. Making that software shareable opens up over 380,000 apps, games, songs and art for kids to add to their DIY computer. The computer kit started much in the same way as the camera kit, sparked from a challenge from a six-year-old in 2013, before the crowd-funding campaign exceeded their $100K goal several times over, raising $1.5 million.

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary K. Grigonis
Former Contributor
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
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