If Lego had a 21st-century facelift, it would look a lot like SAM, a new kit where the building blocks are electronic modules (or SAMs: sensor actor modules), which wirelessly communicate with each other over Bluetooth.

SAMs are either motors, lights, switches or sensors, and appear as “drag and droppable” icons on the SAM app, allowing users to easily make everyday objects part of the “internet of things”, but with one major advantage: there’s no coding required.

Behind the idea is 23-year-old Joachim Horn, a Belgian mechanical engineer and Imperial College graduate. This year has been a pivotal year for him and his team: taken under the wing of Microsoft Ventures (which helps new startups take off) in the summer, by September SAM Labs was set up in Whitechapel, east London.

By late October it had raised £125,000 on Kickstarter - over two and a half times their £50,000 goal (it was a Kickstarter “staff pick”, too).

It’s a product that has clearly got a lot of people excited. Similar to the Raspberry Pi, SAM is aimed at making electronics as accessible as possible to everyone, not just experts.

As Horn explains, while other products have to be wired and coded correctly before you have something that works, with SAM “you have something working straight away and then you learn about coding, so it makes you want to continue and make more complex systems. The idea is that you learn coding by making, as you realise that the same code occurs over and over again.”

In SAM Labs’ tests, children, students and adults – many of whom had never worked with electronics before – “made wonderful things within two hours”, Horn smiles.

“A lot of fun goes into the process. One eight-year-old built a toy car with proximity sensors to autonomously dodge obstacles in the room. “Engineers spend a lot of time just trying to prototype these systems,” Horn continues. “But when an eight-year-old can do it, that’s really cool.”

As SAM’s slogan, “the internet of everything for everyone”, implies, the plain white modules have been designed to look gender- and age-neutral, so anyone (with basic computer skills) could use them. With prices ranging from £60 for SAM Explore, the most basic starter kit (with three SAMs and the SAM app) to £240 for SAM Pro, the most advanced kit (with 11 SAMs, the SAM app and the SAM Cloud), many eight-year-old engineers might not be buying SAMs with their own pocket money just yet.

But it seems very possible that we can expect to see SAMs appearing on the Christmas wishlists of young and old alike this time next year.