Hackaball Kickstarter Campaign Gains Essent Backing

Technology solutions provider Essent is contributing to a toy that will teach children computer programming skills.

Kids playing with Hackaball CPU Programming Toy

Essent made a pledge to the Kickstarter campaign for Hackaball. Children can use a free app to program the Hackaball to play games and invent new ones.

The funding is the latest Essent contribution to a computer programming literacy project. Essent previously used Kickstarter to back Robot Turtles, a board game designed to teach children as young as 3 how to program a computer.

"Essent is a firm advocate in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math education) and in particular is a strong supporter of initiatives that help children learn how to program a computer. Every day, computer programming literacy becomes a more powerful tool to serve kids’ future innovations, the innovations that power everyone’s future," Essent President & CEO Eric Alessi said.

Hackaball is programmable to produce outputs – like lighting-up, rumbles, and sounds – based on inputs like motions including being dropped, kicked or kept still.

The Hackaball campaign has almost doubled its fundraising goal.