BERLIN—How do you get a younger generation, one raised on a seemingly endless supply of smartphones, tablets, and PCs, into not just using such devices, but finding out how they work too? Small development boards like the Raspberry Pi have done wonders for getting kids (and curious adults) into creating all manner of interesting hardware and software. The upcoming BBC Micro:bit promises to go a stage further, too, by giving every Year 7 student in the UK—about a million kids aged 11 to 12—their own Micro:bit board to play with.

But there's another take on the development board, and it's come from the unlikeliest of places: electronics giant Acer. Buried deep within its stand at IFA 2015 in Berlin is a unique development kit called Cloud Professor. It contains the obligatory Arduino board, as well as a variety of accessories, including a USB to GPIO adaptor, a control LED, and even a dust sensor. But rather than just offer yet another way to program things on an Arduino board, the Acer kit also contains a separate module that allows the board to talk to other devices over the Internet.

Essentially, it's an Internet of Things development kit that links into Acer's cloud platform, allowing tinkerers to control various aspects of their connected device via a smartphone or tablet. Because that's often a complex task (particularly for the younger age group the kit is aimed at), Acer is providing a set of apps that automatically communicate with the Cloud Professor module. This lets users concentrate on creating cool stuff, rather than mucking about with cloud protocols.

That's the theory at least, but the kit seems to work rather well. In just a few minutes, I'd hooked up an LED to the GPIO board, which then plugged into the Cloud Professor module. The app automatically detected what kind of module I was using, and jumped straight into the programming interface, allowing me to then turn the LED on and off over the Internet. Sure, this was a very basic use of the device, but it's easy to see the potential of what bright young minds could do with it.

Acer also showed off what an advanced user might do with the kit and a few extra bits and pieces, by creating a small robot that could be controlled via the smartphone app. Again, not massively complicated, but by removing the complex cloud side of the equation, there's far more freedom to experiment with new and interesting uses for Internet-connected devices.

Indeed, with every man and his dog trying to create an IoT platform at the moment (seriously, it's all anyone is talking about at IFA), this grass roots approach to adoption is an intriguing one. The kit will initially be rolled out to selected schools in Asia, and Acer is considering a more widespread rollout should the kit prove successful. There's talk of selling the kit online for around £130/$200, too.

Whatever happens, it's always nice to see a device like Cloud Professor targeted at education: the world needs as many great innovators as it can get.