Technology kit that lets you build computer game system

Stocking filler: DIY Gamer Kits are due to go on sale in time for Christmas

Hackney technology education company Technology Will Save Us (TWSU) is set to release the latest in its line of DIY technology kits in time for Christmas. Its DIY Gamer Kit will teach non-technical people how to build their own handheld computer game system. This is its first DIY kit designed specifically with young people in mind.

TWSU calls itself “a haberdashery for technology and education”. Founders Daniel Hirschmann and Bethany Kolb have set out to empower people to “produce and not just consume technology”.

The company started when Daniel and Bethany were left perplexed by something they had found in the rubbish. “We’re Hackney residents and we found a laptop in our communal garbage, and that really was the spark for this conversation about what role technology plays in our lives and the fact that we have so much technology we don’t know what to do with it when we don’t want it,” says Bethany.

“We don’t know how to be creative with it. Because we don’t have skills to make things with it, it’s all very crude and mysterious. We believe that if we understood it more, understood the innards of it we may become more creative and productive with it.”

With other kits on the market including a gardening, soldering and speaker kit, TWSU has turned to how young people understand technology. With funding won from the Make Things Do Stuff Campaign, supported by NESTA, Mozilla and the Nominet Trust, TWSU was able to conduct research about technology education with hundreds of young people across the country.

The findings showed that although young people were using technology and learning about it at school, this was so far removed from their everyday lives that the learning became ineffective. “Young people are learning about technology in school but most of the things around technology that they’re learning to do are so unrelated to their lives that they end up not remembering what skill they learned while doing it. For example, making a key chain or making an Excel document.”

One of recurring themes that emerged from this research is that gaming is relevant to young people.

The DIY Gamer Kit will run on the Arduino platform, popular in the maker community. This will make the code to every homemade game open source and freely available, offering a growing library of free games. It will also come with an infrared sensor, allowing multiplayer games.

Two games are bundled with the kit, both produced by 15-year-old GCSE student Finnbar Keating.