The Outdoor IoT Construction Kit is a reconfigurable set of physical and digital components designed to support children’s outdoor free play using the SAM Labs coding system. The kit was developed as part of the Playing Out with IoT project, in collaboration with Gavin Wood and project partners.
The design emerged from a series of co-creative workshops with children at a community centre in the North East of England. During these workshops, children engaged in outdoor free play using early prototypes, allowing insights about play, robustness, and interaction to be gathered through direct observation and participation.
These insights were incorporated into the construction kit, which combines predefined configurations with open-ended possibilities for children to create their own IoT play objects. The physical components are watertight and robust, enabling use in outdoor environments, while the integration of coding and reconfigurable parts supports experimentation, adaptation, and creative play.