Soundbops is a MIDI-enabled toy for helping kids to learn and play music
Building bops
Stick a piano in front of a kid and they’ll randomly hit some keys and probably have fun, but won’t learn to play music. The idea behind Soundbops (£70) is to demystify the process of playing music, but ensure it’s still a blast. Naturally, this involves luridly coloured plastic. You get a pile of ‘bops’ – notes you attach to a plastic keyboard. Turn a dial to change the instrument, and hammer away at a bop to play the note. Bops can be stacked to create chords – or cacophonies – and the kit includes accessible guides to notation and scales. And once your little musical prodigies have outgrown everything in the Soundbops box, you can connect the main unit to an iOS device via Bluetooth and have them terrorise GarageBand instead.