STEM start-up creates first-ever working Harry Potter wand

Learn transfiguration tricks that even Professor McGonagall would be proud of 
Amelia Heathman24 July 2018

If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll know there are few things more covetable in the popular franchise than the wands.

They're the way the characters can conjure up magic and cast spells, a central component of the Wizarding World

STEM company Kano is bringing the magical wands to life with the Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit, the first ever STEM product inspired by the Harry Potter universe.

Alex Klein, CEO of Kano, says that Harry Potter is the perfect fit for a coding product. “In today's world, the programmers and the computer scientists who work at Facebook and Google are the contemporary wizards. They are a small, secret subsection of society that can write and incant these magic words that control the world around us, predict the future and can make you think and believe things," he tells the Standard.

“The premise of the coding kit is you can learn these powers and wield them yourself."

The Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit is an exciting and enchanting way to learn how to code. You build the wand yourself, connecting up its pieces, including a Bluetooth sensor and its computer brain, to make it ready to use.

Then with Kano’s easy to use app you go through more than 70 different challenges set in places such as Hogwarts, Diagon Alley and the Forbidden Forest. The challenges teach you about sensors, data and how to code along the way, with some help from your favourite Harry Potter characters.

The Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit is perfect if you've never coded before
Kano

In Charms class, you can learn the Wingardium Leviosa spell and really levitate a feather. Or, in Defence Against the Dark Arts, you can learn how to banish those pesky Cornish Pixies with a flick of the wand. You can also code the wand to do transfiguration tricks that even Professor McGonagall would be proud of.

The wand is built using one of Kano’s original products: its sensor kit. But it goes one step further in that the wand combines: a gyroscope which determines the wand's orientation; an accelerometer which measures the wand's movement; and a magnetometer which measures magnetic forces.

This combination means the device is able to detect its own location and speed in a 3D space, making it capable of tracking your hand movements.

The sensors in the wand allow it to place a cursor on the screen exactly where you point it, to make the magical moments happen. And, you can code the wand to make sounds or light up when you do specific movements as part of a spell.

Like with all of Kano’s products, the Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit is aimed at ages six and upwards, and it's perfect if you’ve never coded before.

“By the time you’ve finished with a Kano product you will be able to build a real application, understand and use concepts like control flow, iteration, logic, data scripts and use javascript,” explains Klein. “The aspiration is that you go from zero to hero.”

Kano's Harry Potter coding app works on tablets as well as laptops and computers
Kano

The company is celebrating its fifth birthday this year and has shipped over 350,000 units worldwide that are teaching people all around the world to learn how to code and interact with technology. Last year, it raised £21 million in Series B funding, one of the largest raised by a hardware company in Europe.

Klein, who taught himself to code when he was 10 years old, believes that the current environment for learning about programming isn’t welcoming to young minds, which inspired him to create Kano.

“In some ways, there has been this divide preserved by the tech community of 'we make the stuff and we decide and define for you it will be'. What Kano is suggesting is that if the tools are better, the experience will be more fun if you as the individual can write code and change it,” he says.

The Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit is available to pre-order now for £99 at Kano.me and will go on general sale in October.

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