The Raspberry Pico Microcontroller is a low cost device that you can program to turn on/off connected hardware. This could be LED lights, or motors.

You can also connect sensors such as PIR motion sensors, light gates and temperature sensors.
We can write Python programs to control how the Microcontroller responds to inputs.

Physical computing is the term we use to describe messing about with all this hardware, to create smart lighting, security systems or robot hovercrafts!

Rather than staring at an abstract screen, we can test our programs to see how the physical devices respond. This gives us a much more intuitive understanding of key programming concepts such as selection and iteration.