Over on element14, we’ve started a series of posts describing the projects we’re pursuing for the hackerspace challenge. The first one just went live, and more will be up soon.

The whole idea behind the dock blocks is extensibility. They’re goal is to provide a physical prop for all sorts of math activities (and any other activities an enterprising teacher can think of to use them for). The current focus has just a numeric display and lets the various blocks communicate by “docking” to each other, or to a master “station” blog (which holds the more expensive programmable bits). The reason for this is so that it’s easy for a teacher to buy or create more of the little bits–which students actually use–without risking the costs of a broken computer or more expensive heavy duty microcontroller.

Check it out!