Started by Brown Dog Gadgets, Crazy Circuits leaves the plastic parts to LEGO and makes circuit boards with giant holes that fit over the studs. The fear of obsolescence is one barrier that they have for sales parents and teachers will have a hard time if the electronics sets they buy one year go out of business the next year and they can’t keep buying parts, so there is some justified reticence. There are new players popping in and out of existence all the time. The PlayersĮach company has a different twist they claim makes them better than others.
This isn’t meant to sound like an advertisement for LEGO it’s just an observation that LEGO is a big company with a premium market similar to Apple, and the little guys who are trying to play in the same sandbox are at risk of getting stomped by the big guy. Their aim is the Hello World of electronics. Their goal is more about getting a light to blink, or a speaker to make noise, or a button to trigger an action, with no computers and no programming. I’ve seen lots of elementary school kids at FIRST LEGO League competitions showing off their extensive knowledge of Mindstorms programming, which uses drag-and-drop blocks in a graphical user interface similar to Scratch.įor some of the LEGO-compatible companies, though, they perceive the barriers of Mindstorms as too high. Also, LEGO has always been known for their easy-to-understand instructions. Toys are cheap, but electronics are not, and finding a gap for a company to exist is challenging.
on their products and expect parents and educators to throw gobs of money at them, so my jaded-business-guy guess is that claiming “LEGO-compatibility” serves as a price anchor and they only need to price themselves slightly below LEGO prices to make the argument for frugality. Still, these days it seems like people throw the letters S.T.E.M. These are valid points LEGO does come with sticker shock, and working with Mindstorms involves programming. The LEGO-compatible electronics startups aren’t scared, though, because they believe LEGO’s price point is prohibitive for a lot of people, and the complexity of the kits is a further barrier to kids and educators. Apple has a history of adding features to IOS that duplicate popular apps, wiping out the smaller companies, and with Mindstorms and Boost LEGO can do the same thing by adding to their product line. LEGO already has the Mindstorms set, and they just released the Boost robot for helping teach coding, so one would think this a dangerous market in which to exist. littleBits eventually caught on and started offering adapter plates, and that fact demonstrates how much demand there is to stick with the studs. The parent choosing between something that’s LEGO-compatible and a completely separate ecosystem like littleBits (or Capsela) sees having to set aside all the LEGO and buy all new plastic parts and learn the new ecosystem, which is a significant re-investment. When it comes to leveling up and learning about electronics, it makes sense to do that by adding on to a thing they already know and understand, and it means they can continue to play with and get more use from their existing sets. The main reason for LEGO-compatibility is familiarity. Now they’re ubiquitous, and fighting each other for their slice of space in your child’s box of bricks. Within the last few years, a lot of companies have started with the aim to disrupt the educational electronics industry using their LEGO-compatible sets.
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