Del Mar School teacher uses own creation to teach kids basic circuitry
- Emily Lavin
- Sep 25, 2019
- 1 min read

One of the first projects students tackled this year in Nate MacDonald’s Del Mar Middle School design lab was building self-moving Lego cars with the help of electronic building blocks called Circuit Cubes. The small cubes — a motor, a battery, an LED, a switch and more — can be combined magnetically or with wires to create simple circuits that power gadgets. Backed by more than $2 million in venture capital, MacDonald, 45, and his former coworker John Schuster co-founded Tenka Labs in 2015. They developed the cubes, which are sold individually as well as part of simple kits that enable kids to build a variety of projects, from a flashlight to a self-powered car to a motor-powered machine that draws with a pen or marker. The cubes can also be snapped onto Legos — they’re exactly two Lego bricks thick — so kids can power their own creations. (Clara Lu photo / For The Ark)
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