Sony's Koov is a candy-colored coding course for kids

STEM skills are in high demand right now, making toys that teach science and engineering popular with parents hoping to give their kids a leg up in the job market. Products like Hasbro's new robot that teaches coding have joined kits like Lego Mindstorms on store shelves. Now Sony is making its own plunge into STEM education with the Koov robotics kit, with its decades of design experience being put to work in the hopes of training the next generation of engineers. Koov has a lot in common with Lego Mindstorms: Both are building sets that revolve around taking a "core" processing unit and attaching motors, sensors and non-connected colored blocks to it, with the assembled robot programmed via an app. But Koov blocks are more cube-like, each piece designed around sets of four boxes reminiscent of Tetris.