Kniwwelino: A Lightweight and WiFi Enabled Prototyping Platform for Children

Abstract

Nowadays, computational thinking skills are considered as fundamental for our future daily life and many initiatives and tools are created to foster these skills. In this paper, we present the Kniwwelino, a new platform for prototyping physical computing projects based on WiFi. The novelty of our solution lies in the use of a WiFi chip on a small, extendable board, programmable via a block based visual programming language, making the platform compact, low-cost, WiFi enabled, and accessible to children. This paper presents the design rationale and implementation of the platform as well as two simple, example projects making use of the new WiFi-based functionalities.