Meraklı Tosba

Overview

Meraklı Tosba was my first real step into entrepreneurship. We built it as a way to teach children coding concepts and algorithmic thinking — not in front of a screen, but inside a physical game environment. We started when coding education for children was barely a category in Turkey: the product was noticeably ahead of the market.

The first version was a full game kit: a robotic turtle toy at the centre, a controller board the child could load code blocks into and run, a set of physical code-block cards, story-themed playmats and a guide. The child sequences code blocks to move the turtle through stories on the mats toward specific goals — and along the way, picks up loops, conditionals and sequencing as game mechanics rather than lecture material. From the start, two principles shaped the design: structural decisions that kept the electronics safe for a child's hands, and a real pedagogical approach to the learning curve.

The first batch was 3D-printed and the response from schools and parents went well past what we'd planned for; Meraklı Tosba is still talked about as one of the most thoughtful children's coding toys ever shipped in Turkey. But the cost of moving to full mass production — the kit has a lot of plastic parts — sat above our financial capacity and the grants we had access to, which made it hard to keep up with demand. In a later phase, we ported the same pedagogical approach into a Flutter mobile game where children solve progressively harder drag-and-drop puzzles. BLE bridged the mobile app to the physical toy, and OTA firmware updates kept already-shipped units evolving.