Meticulously modeled after the stylized heads of hair that one can attach to LEGO figures, this 3D-printed helmet makes you look like an action toy while you ride your bike around town.

The design and innovation firm MOEF created this prototype, basing everything from its size and shape to its color on the toy figure that inspired it.

The idea, in part, is to raise awareness about riding without a helmet, which 44% of children do – perhaps for kids and adults alike this kind of design an inspire more safe biking practices.

The scaled-up version has the same bowl-cut while an attached safety strap turns it into functional protective gear. Currently a prototype, one hopes LEGO might take a look and decide there is a market for these.

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New build-a-drone kits combine LEGO bricks and off-the-shelf parts designed by Flybrix to create kid-friendly, wirelessly-controlled drones made to be easily reassembled if they run into something and crash. In the words of another famous kid-friendly robot: disassemble, reassemble!

Flybrix is a San Francisco startup aiming to make drone-building easier and more accessible. Their kit-based flyers can be controlled via Bluetooth by an iOS or Android smartphone (or custom controller).

Children learning to fly need not worry about running these indoor-friendly bots into walls – they can be involved in collisions then put back together. The basic kit contains a few dozen pieces and instructions to build a small quadcopter in just 15 minutes – other advanced kits let kids expand and modify the basic drone (or build their own).

“Co-founders of the startup, Amir Hirsch, Robb Walters and Holly Kasun, want to get teens, or younger kids with adult supervision, interested in things like geometry, aerodynamics and electrical engineering.” While the company isn’t an official LEGO partner, their gadgets are all LEGO-compatible add-ons. One the cofounders has three degrees in math and electrical engineering from MIT, where he first got the inspiration to create Flybrix.

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An open-ended educational project at the intersection of gaming and computer science education, Project Bloks is an open hardware platform anyone can use to teach coding to children.

Project Bloks is made of three core components: the “Brain Board,” “Base Boards” and “Pucks.” The Brain Board houses the main processing unit and is built on top of a Raspberry Pi Zero, providing power and connectivity. It can communicate via WiFi and Bluetooth.

The Base Boards create grids or different programming flows, and feature capacitive sensors. The Pucks are essentially code instructions in physical form, including dials and switches, arrows and bottoms. They turn things on and off, up or down. These are cheap, requiring no active electronic components.

“You really need a lot of expertise,” explains Jayme Goldstein, the leader of the project. “You need to know electrical engineering, you need to know hardware engineering. You’ve got to spend a lot of time developing the infrastructure before you can even get to the educational design. Next is the money. There’s a lot of research and development associated with hardware, along with opportunity costs.”

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In a world where so many 3D-printed objects are still simply toys or test cases, it is refreshing to see such technology being put to use in the service of helping kids who cannot otherwise write and draw.

The ‘Glifo‘ (images by Sara Monacchi) series is a set of customizable writing utensils that can help young people with nervous system impairments to express themselves while also facilitating rehabilitation processes.

Affected children frequently have trouble with the smaller movements and grips necessary to hold and utilize implements, making it difficult to connect what their brain visualizes to the fine-tuned actions needed to realize that vision on the page.

The series consists of various handles and attachments that help hold down pieces of paper or make it easier to grip pens, pencils, markers and crayons.

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A kit of parts both playful and educational, this cool set of components lets children design simple movement sequences and test various kinetic strategies.

LINKKI features three motors – for full rotation, limited rotation and wifi connectivity – tied into a peg board where various pieces can be plugged in to create endless combinations (particularly once you start hacking your own pieces from scratch).

“The flat mechanism makes the design process with which engineering such as mechanics, robotics, electronics, and model making is involved feel like just drawing on the paper: fast, easy, and intuitive,” writes its creator. “Flat parts also enables users to make their own parts with on-the-shelf material such as cardboard—that is, it’s easy to hack and open-ended.”

The toy kit is intended in part to engender interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) by engaging it as a kind of play and making discoveries more intuitive, casual and entertaining for kids.

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