A microboard built for the classroom.

The Open Minds board is a custom microboard with a hexagonal footprint. The shape is not decorative: it is what lets the sensor hats stack onto it, edge to edge, so a class can build up exactly the instrument a project needs and take it apart again for the next one.

It runs MicroPython, and it is programmed from this website over the browser's serial connection. A student writes code on the page, presses a button, and it runs on the board in their hands. There is nothing to download, no environment to configure, no account to provision on a school laptop. That matters in a classroom, where a lesson cannot wait on an install that needs admin rights.

The board is a complete instrument the moment it comes out of the box. Eight touch inputs, a ring of addressable lights, a light sensor and built-in WiFi: enough for a class to make something real on the first afternoon, before a single hat is added.

Then it grows. Each sensor hat clips onto the same hexagonal footprint and speaks to the board over the shared bus, so a project becomes exactly the instrument it needs to be. Add Motion and it answers to gesture, add the Motor hat and it drives, add Distance and it senses the space around it. One board, taken apart and rebuilt, becomes a hundred projects across a year.

The hats are a starting point, not a ceiling. The board carries a Grove-compatible connector, so a class can plug in any of a huge range of ready-made modules: distance and gesture sensors, knobs and sliders, air-quality, moisture and temperature sensors, OLED screens, more lights, more speakers, more motors. They clip straight in, with no soldering.

Beyond that connector, the board breaks its remaining pins out to points a student can reach with crocodile clips or a screwdriver, so almost any other input or output can be wired in, not only the ones that speak the standard bus. And because WiFi is built in, a project can reach the web or talk to another board across the room. The principle is simple: read something, decide something, do something, with whatever the project needs on either end.

Photographed from the current production run: the main board with the Light hat alongside it, the Motor hat on its own, and a motor stack assembled.

Buy boards, hats and decks outright, individually or in boxes of ten and thirty for a class or a whole year group. A group can start with a single board, and the more boards they add the further a project can go: boards talk to one another, share the work, and combine their senses and outputs.