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Here's where you'll find all the latest news about technology for children. We love to follow cool new inventions on Kickstarter and we hunt out all the latest announcements about tech toys and gadgets for the coming Christmas holidays. You'll also get our take on children's technology stories in the media.

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Our kids technology product reviews are intended to help you work out whether a toy, gadget or kit is a good fit for your child or family. There's lots of cool stuff available, but is it the right choice for the child or teenager that you are buying for? We'll help you make the right choices and get the best value for money.

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Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends assemble. We create gift lists to help you make good choices for kids technology which helps them develop the right skills for the future. We research the best in Coding Toys and Games, Making / Craft Tools and Kits, STEM/STEAM related gifts, Programmable Robots, Electronics Kits and Gadgets for Tech Age Kids and Teens.

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Get crafty with technology. Here we'll post all our ideas and projects using technology to get creative and making with kids. You'll find anything from making a lemon battery to a glow-in-the-dark Minecraft sword. Our projects are tried and tested on our own kids or at events we run, so we are sure you can have a go at home with your kids. Some of our projects use specific tech gadgets which we provide links for you to purchase.

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STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. In recent years there is an increased focus in these areas of study. We like to include Art and Design too, so we often talk about STEAM (A stands for Art). At Tech Age Kids we believe Coding is a new literacy and children need to understand how technology works, practice making skills and grow in their curiosity to make a better future for us all.

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Coding is increasingly being recognised as an important skill for children to learn. Some will learn to code at school or at a coding club, but it's brilliant if they get support at home too.

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We think it's really important for kids to get hands-on with electronics and learn how to make circuits and write code to control hardware. Younger kids can start with conductive playdough. For kids who like to combine craft and tech, littleBits are fab. And we love SAM Labs wireless electronics components for making it easy for kids to make Internet of Things inventions. Lots of electronics kits for kids have support for the Arduino microprocessor environment. The DuinoKit Jr is one of our favourites. Arduino is a fab skill for older kids and teens to develop.

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We love robots at Tech Age Kids, especially programmable ones. We've got lots of them and write reviews and projects that use them. Our programmable robots for kids buying guide is a good place to start if you're not sure what's available. Roby the mBot Meccano robot dog is one of our popular projects and has been with us to lots of events. Our Ozobot LEGO trailer is fab for kids who love LEGO and robots.

MAKING AND CRAFT$show=/search/label/making

We're advocates of the creative use of technology, but this needs to be balanced with developing physical skills such as papercraft, woodwork, clay modelling, technical drawing and soldering. If children don't develop these skills as they grow up then physical making projects can become frustrating rather than fun. The Maker Community uses the term 'making' as a broad term to include all sorts of artisan skills or craft activities. Being able to make things can lead to life-long hobbies or even careers. It's a great feeling to be able to take a project from an idea in your head to a real object that does something. We're particularly interested to explore products that combine maker skills with tech skills such as electronics but others focus purely on the physical making skills that are still important to modern making.

The Jacquard Loom in the History of Computing

Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French inventor from a weaving family, invented the Jacquard loom which kickstarted the automation of the weaving industry. The Jacquard loom used programmable cards and went on to influence Charles Babbages work so the loom is considered an important step towards modern computing.

Jacquard was born on July 7th 1752 and worked on his loom in the early 1800s.

This portrait of Jacquard was actually woven on one of his looms. The amount of detail that could be achieved was a key part of its success.


Before the Jacquard Loom

Before Jacquard invented his much improved loom, weaving was a complex and error-prone process. Fashionable people wanted complex designs that took days to create with a weaver working with a 'drawboy', a child who would lift bunches threads to get the right pattern. It was very hard work and mistakes were expensive. 

What is a Jacquard Loom?

A Jacquard loom is an automated weaving loom which can create intricate patterns from a series of punched cards which encode which thread should be used where. Jacquard invented his loom in 1804.

This video from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows how the process works from creating designs on square paper through to how the holes in the cards control which threads are visible in a pattern:



This LEGO Weav3r project shows the concept. It uses a program instead of punched cards (and has a companion project to scan in designs made in LEGO!)


Like many inventors, Jacquard built on the invention of others. He didn't invent punched cards to program intricate patterns and he didn't come up with the idea of getting a machine to automatically follow them. What he did do was improve the ideas that others had come up with and make the Jacquard loom work well enough for it to take off.

Jacquard's Woven Portrait

To show off his invention Jacquard had portraits of himself woven. These portraits needed 24,000 cards to encode the design. Source

The portrait is a piece of pixel art with the design captured in rows of dots on the cards to encode which thread would be visible at each location in the picture.

Charles Babbage had one of Jacquard's woven portraits and delighted in getting his guests to try and guess what it was.

The detail in the portrait is amazing and could only be achieved with the advances in the loom that Jacquard achieved. It needed automation, lots of threads and a reliable mechanism to be able to produce pieces like this.


Punched Cards

Punched cards are cards that have holes in them to store information. A mechanical device can behave differently depending on whether a hole is present at a location or not. In the case of the Jacquard loom the holes determine which groups of threads will be visible at a particular point in a design. 

In 1725, Frenchman Basile Bouchon came up with the idea of 'programming' a weaving loom using holes in paper strips. Bouchon's inspiration came from mechanical musical instruments that used raised pegs to play music. His colleague Jean-Baptiste Falcon improved the technique to use sturdier card that could be joined together in a loop. 

Charles Babbage used punched cards in his analytical engine designs in 1836. 

Herman Hollerith took the idea of punched cards and used them to store data input in his 1889 automated tabulating machine. Hollerith's work led to punched cards being used to program early digital computers. 

Punched cards played an important role in computing history and were regularly used to program computers until the 1960s. There are still lots of programmers around who remember using punched cards. Technology has moved on quickly in recent years!

Automation

The first looms that used punched tapes and cards weren't automated. In 1745 Jacques de Vaucanson, an inventor and maker of mechanical automata, made the first automated loom punch card reading mechanism which moved a punched paper tape on to the next position after each row. The loom itself was still manually operated. Vaucanson's invention was impressive but not yet practical for widespread use. 

After lots of refinements Jacquard managed to create a reliable loom that put us on the path to automation and programmable machines.

Lots of people were worried about the future of their jobs as more tasks became automated.

A similar thing is happening today as we're making robots that can perform more and more tasks and developing artificial intelligence services that can automate work that requires thinking.

The automation of manufacturing lead to different kinds of jobs and eventually to better working conditions. Will we get it right this time?








24 days of Scratch coding book cover and cute penguin
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Tech Age Kids | Technology for Children: The Jacquard Loom in the History of Computing
The Jacquard Loom in the History of Computing
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