Products We Love!
Tiblo Lets Dyslexic Kids Snap Words And Sounds Together Like Legos
Tiblo, an "open-ended learning aid" developed by Sumit Pandey and Swati Srivastava helps dyslexic kids become more facile with words, letters, and phonemes by "connecting" them physically like puzzle pieces. Each colorful Tiblo is a "modular interactive electronic block" that can record 10 seconds of audio, play it back, and snap with other blocks to form syntactical patterns based on the meaning the kid has assigned to the block. (The blocks are also designed with a broad gridlike surface that kids or teachers can decorate with pictures, letters, pushpins, or anything else they like.) If a child is having trouble reading a written word or sentence, its component parts can be assigned to Tiblo blocks and sounded out individually in the teacher's voice or the child's—and then reconnected in other orientations.
A $20 Kit Lends Any Paper Plane an Electric Motor
The only thing better than a perfectly made paper airplane arcing through the air is that same airplane refusing to land because it's got an electric motor.
And all you need is Power Up, a kit that allows you to mount an electric propeller to a standard paper plane. The invention of Shai Goitein, an Israeli industrial designer, Power Up consists of a lightweight supercapacitor attached to a rear propeller via a carbon-fiber shaft. Simply clip the module onto the plane’s nose with the propeller at the rear, charge it for 20 seconds using the separate battery pack, and let her rip! Goitein recommends doing so in a large, open field. One charge provides enough juice for 90 seconds of flight, which is probably more than you need, since you’ll have to retrieve it afterward.
The biggest challenge, the designer says, was figuring out a system that works with many different kinds of airplanes. Because the module rests in the plane’s crease—a structural feature of all such gliders—the center of gravity is maintained regardless of the model. “As long as it maintains the basic stability factors,” Goitein says, “it can really fly.”
Power Up is available for $19.99 from Think Geek. Batteries sold separately.
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