While I was at ENIAC working on Cubetto, I also built an end-to-end teaching curriculum for kids — my job was to take hardware-with-programming and make it reachable for an age group that couldn’t yet touch a C++ compiler without crying.
The design
Commercial modules on purpose, not custom boards. If a parent wants to help their kid continue learning after the course, they need to be able to buy the same parts on their own. So: Arduino, Arduino-compatible sensors, steppers, LEDs, ultrasonic distance sensors, IR. All things readily available, all things that will still be available in five years.
The programming front-end was block-based — a Scratch-adjacent drag-and-drop environment that generated the underlying Arduino code. The blocks mapped one-to-one onto the real concepts the student would later need in text-based code: loops, conditionals, variables, function calls. No magic blocks that don’t exist in the “real” version of the language.
The arc
The curriculum starts small — blink an LED, read a sensor, reverse those into basic cause-and-effect. Builds toward combining inputs and outputs (turn a light on when you clap; drive a motor when something gets too close). Ends with a programmable car kit: steering, obstacle avoidance, a few simple behaviours programmed by the student. The student leaves with a physical object they programmed, which is a different kind of memory than leaving with a screenshot of a correct answer.
How it ran
I designed the full curriculum and taught it at one school to establish it, then other instructors took it forward across the programme. Built in 2019–2020. This ended up informing a lot of how I think about making technical concepts land with people who don’t already speak the vocabulary — including when training engineers later.