WIRED has an article posted about an upcoming children’s puppet web series, entitled Circuit Playground, produced by Adafruit Industries.

From the WIRED article:

Their new online show will teach the essentials of electronics and circuitry to children through kid-friendly dolls with names like Cappy the Capacitor and Hans the 555 Timer Chip. Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Adafruit’s founder and chief engineer (and 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year), will host the episodes, with her team assisting with onscreen and puppeteering duties.

“We’ll have each component have a story, a song and something to do,” Fried says. “We’ll have live feeds in our factory on how things are made. It’s a little Elmo for engineering, a little Mr. Rogers for resistors and a little Sesame Street for Circuits.”

Adafruit is familiar with online broadcasts, hosting weekly “Show-and-Tell” and “Ask an Engineer” shows on Google+ and Ustream for over three years. Circuit Playground was a natural extension for them. “We saw the audience and the participants getting younger with more advanced projects, so we figured there was something there,” Fried says.

Limor Fried was just named Entrepreneur of 2012 and we think her and everyone at Adafruit rocks. We buy kits and gizmos from Adafruit all the time – my son built himself a Pong Clock, I made an Ice Tube Clock, we bought a pantload of Raspberry Pi stuff and we both have way too much troublesome fun with our lockpicks and TV-Be-Gones. It is awesome fun.

Now, I don’t want to be a snarky curmudgeonly puppet snob about any of this – I wish them well and know the show will, in its own way, be very successful – but I really hope their puppets and puppetry skills don’t suck. That would be a sad. There’s enough bad puppetry suckage out in the world. The art deserves more craft. Fingers crossed.

Cheers.