Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the Little Golden Books you read as a child? Well, they’re making a comeback in a bid to make themselves relevant to the older crowd, especially to the gamers.

We kid. It’s not an official effort by the publishers and they’re not actual books either. Rather, they’re just artistic covers done by animator Joebot that are based on the original cover art of the Golden Books.

So how did this series come about? Well, Joebot liked the art on the original books so much that he decided to pattern fictional books based on Bioshock, Portal and Skyrim. The results are awesome and it’s all really done in keeping with the theme and the books’ classic style. Scroll down to get a closer looks at each of the covers.

“Somewhere, beyond the sea, there lived a little girl and her big friend Mr. Bubbles.”

“The Cake may be a lie, but the friendship between a little girl and her robot friend is true love.”

“Our hero, our hero… claims a warriors heart, but the body of a child.” 

Prints are available at Joebot’s Etsy store, where they retail for $20(USD) each. You can also get the entire set of three for $50.

[via Geekologie]

Adafruit, the DIY electronics website and marketplace, is espousing the popular strategy of “get em’ young” with a new live action short video series broadcast on YouTube. The series, called Circuit Playground, takes an alphabetical approach to teaching kids about the basics of circuits, components and concepts that will come in handy if the tots watching have aspirations of becoming electrical engineers, or just of building their own hobby projects at home.

The inaugural episode covers amperes, the unit of measurement for electric current flowing through a circuit. The co-hosts are Adabot, an adorable robot puppet helping keep the kids entertained, and Adafruit founder Limor Fried, providing easy-to-follow, but not patronizing explanations of the concepts involved. The intro features a number of animated characters representing circuit components, and there’s even a special guest appearance from André-Marie Ampère, after whom the ampere is named, so there’s an element of science history in the mix, too.

At less than 5 minutes, you also won’t have to keep your kids focused too long to take in the message. And if you’re a big kid who might not be all that well versed in the basics of circuits and electronics, you’ll probably learn something, too.

Here is the most adorable theft ever. A two-year-old toddler figured out how to use nail clippers to pick the lock on his eight-year-old sister’s door so that he could steal a stuffed animal at night. His parents set up a baby camera to see the incredible “crime” go down. More »

Puppet shows and tech rarely ever mix so succinctly: Insert Coin finalist Gal Sasson has taken the ages-old art form and put it on a motorized stage powered by Arduino, making it more entertaining and interactive in the process. The product, dubbed Make a Play, consists of a stage and control board (complete with buttons, knobs and joysticks) all hooked into a nearby computer, and we had the chance to play around with it at Engadget Expand. After decorating the background and adding puppets and toys onto the stage, kids can control the lighting, move two motorized carts to change the position of each puppet and they can even turn on tiny LED lights attached to the toys. But it goes one step further: you can record all of the puppets’ movements and audio associated with your play, which means that your creations can be played back and reproduced on the stage whenever you want. Gal is still working on his launch strategy, so pricing and availability have not been officially announced. We take the stage for a spin in the video and image gallery below, so take a closer look.

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