Expanding toy platform

Sony is focusing on developing educational toys as well as gadgets. The educational toy platform toio has just been released in March this year, but already has several expansion packs and offers children various ways to play.

Originally this was a toy product born from Sony's in-house entrepreneurship support project, and the prototype was released on crowdfunding. Then they renewed its hardware and developed a general consumer version. It consists of a small block robot called a toio cube, a console that contains software, and two ring-shaped controllers. It may look like a game console, or you may also think of this as a radio controlled robot. But that's just one of the elements. First of all, children can learn programming to move robots using physical cards called instruction cards. To make a toio cube remember a program, simply place it on the instruction card. It's easy, but children can do complex programming with a combination of cards. A picture book is included in the programming kit using toio cube, and children can learn the basics of programming while reading this, combine instruction cards, and move the toio cube according to the situation of the picture book. If children get used to programming with physical cards, they can learn visual programming languages and more advanced programming from their PCs and run toio cube. If they get tired of playing toio cube only move, the various expansion kits allow children to control complex games themselves. The list price is 18,678 yen (tax included), and it is already sold at major mail-order sites and consumer electronics mass retailers, but depending on the shops you may be able to buy it cheaper.