Tech company Kano has created a coding kit for the Harry Potter universe, with a wand that users can programme to cast spells when they wave their hand.
Kano partnered with Warner Bros Consumer Products on the coding kit, which is the first official Harry Potter-branded STEM toy and uses canonical spell-casting gestures.
It lets kids ? as well as coding-curious adult Harry Potter fans ? assemble the wand from step-by-step instructions, program what effects different spell gestures should have, and then use those to play games in the Wizarding World of the accompanying app.
Users end up levitating feathers, conjuring pumpkins, manipulating flames and engorging Every Flavour jellybeans until they take over the screen. The coding wand gets users programming by shifting around brightly coloured blocks of information
The wand responds to an array of spell-casting motions taken directly from the Warner Bros movies and theme parks, such as wingardium leviosa, expelliarmus, stupefy and incendio.
An official lexicon of what these gestures looked like didn't exist but had to be developed by Warner Bros specifically for this project.
"They had wikis here, some references over there," said Hinchion. "They had to create a canon list of movements for us. It came to us on post-it notes, all sorts of little drawings. I think this is the first product that has that canon list of motions."
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