Picture a pair of scissors, and there’s a good chance they’re orange. But have you ever wondered why? It’s all thanks to the 368-year-old Finnish company Fiskars, whose ubiquitous orange scissors turned 50 this month. The story behind their design involves the advent of ergonomic design in the 1960s, a companywide vote, and one very happy accident.
Fiskars has sold more than 1 billion of its scissors, and today they sit in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Orange is so strongly associated with the company, it even won a lawsuit to trademark its orange–making it one of only a few companies to have successfully trademarked a color.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
