Joshua is the founder of Brown Dog Gadgets in Brookfield, Wisconsin, USA. Originally a middle school teacher, Joshua found it very annoying as a teacher that all the fun science activities his students were doing had to be disassembled at the end of each class. This is pretty much how Brown Dog Gadgets came to be. 

Images: (c) Brown Dog Gadgets – used with permission

As quickly mentioned, Brown Dog Gadgets specializes in ‘make and take’ projects – these are things that kids create in the classroom and then can take home when finished. This is opposite to most other edtech companies in the United States – most of them sell more expensive kits which are disassembled at the end of a project and then stay at school. 

The benefit of course is that kids can take ownership of their projects and will be more motivated and enthusiastic about their project. Also, kids take home their projects to their families and friends and thereby learn and share the knowledge they acquired even more. 

Brown Dog Gadgets also developed a line of modular Electronics called Crazy Circuits. Again being a low-cost system, it is expandable and compatible with Lego blocks. In combination with conductive tape, students can work on simple circuit-board-like projects which are fun, easy to build and easy to troubleshoot. 

Shownotes

• Brown Dog Gadgets Website
• Brown Dog Gadgets on Twitter and Instagram
• Evil Mad Scientists and Full Episode with Lenore Edman
• Instructables.com
• Robotshop.com
• Brown Dog Gadgets GitHub Repos
• Live Streams: Youtube,  Facebook & Twitch

Lenore is the Co-Founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and currently lives in Sunnyvale, California – if you don’t know that’s the “heart of the silicon valley” according to the city brochure of Sunnyvale – but seriously, it could not be more central in the valley.

Established in 2006, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories strives to live up to its motto, “Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a time,” serving as a resource for budding evil mad scientists everywhere.

The Evil Mad Scientist Shop is the place to go if you are looking for fun, geeky and educational projects. For example, I purchased the Egg-Bot years back which is a plotter for eggs. After building the project kit, you can design with the open source drawing program Inkscape and then instruct the Egg-Bot to transfer the drawing to an egg. 

I once planned a wonderful workshop at school with this great tool, which did not stop at designing and creating the eggs, but also involved making pancakes after we emptied the eggs and later we even drilled holes to add LEDs to the eggs to make them shine. 

Another great product is AxiDraw.  AxiDraw is a modern pen plotter, capable of writing or drawing on almost any flat surface with a variety of pens and markers. It can be used for drawing computer generated art, which makes it popular with math and computer science teachers.

Shownotes

• Lenore Edman on Twitter
• Evil Mad Scientist Labs on Twitter
• Evil Mad Scientist Labs 
• Blog Post about Bristlebots
• Vibrating Motors
• Blog Post about The EggBot Pro
• The Original EggBot – Deluxe Edition
• The AxiDraw V3 Pen Plotter 
• Lot’s of LEDs
• Flickery Flame Soldering Kit

So Mitch grew up in Chicago, Illinois, USA, went to high school and later  got a master’s degree in electrical engineering. In 1986 he then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work in Silicon Valley

Photos of Electronics Workshops and Conferencess involving Mitch Altman.
Photos by Mitch Altman, CC BY-SA 2.0

You might know Mitch mainly from the maker movement, but Mitch has also been an early developer of VR technologies – and he always stayed true to himself and is a big advocate for positive and responsible use of technology. He quit a job at VPL Research where he was working on virtual reality and he also stopped supporting the Maker Faires after they got involved with the United States Department of Defense.

Mitch started Cornfield Electronics,  a consulting company and after the launch of on of his products, TV-B-Gone, he gave the company the tagline “We make Useful Electronics for a Better World”

What is TV-B-Gone? The website says: The TV-B-Gone® universal remote control allows you to turn virtually any TV On or OFF.  We prefer OFF.

I think this really shows how Mitch is interested in helping us to use technology for CREATING something new and the TV-B-Gone is a fun tool combined with some rebellion against mainstream media consumption that he created to get awareness for this topic. 

Mitch is super important and respected person in the international hackerspace and maker movement. He co-founded Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace, which was probably one of the first three hackerspaces in the US. 

Mitch is traveling a lot and encouraging the formation of hackerspaces, holding panels and workshops on teaching introductory electronics workshops to people of all ages and visiting electronics enthusiast groups around the world.

Shownotes

• Mitch Altman on Twitter
• Mitch Altman on LinkedIn
• Mitch Altman on Wikipedia
• Flickr Account of Mitch Altman
• TV B Gone
• Cornfieldelectronics
• Noisebridge San Francisco Hackerspace
• Ardutouch Music Synthesizer Kit and Ardutouch videos on Youtube
• Soldering DIY Projects
• Trippy RGB Waves Kit and Youtube video about it

Anna just won “the spark”, a special award given out by the newspaper Handelsblatt and the consulting company McKinsey for her startup and first product Robo Wunderkind.

The company Robo Wunderkind is based in Vienna, Austria, and they currently sell a couple of robotic kits. These kits include a selection of kid-firiendly, easy-to-connect blocks. Of all these blocks, the most important one is probably the so-called main block, which is the heart of any robot that the kids build.

Images: Copyright 2019 Robo Wunderkind, Press Kit, used with permission

There are many other blocks, here’s a list:

• Distance Sensor Block
• Light Sensor Block
• Motor Block
• Servo Block
• Button Block
• Motion detector Block
• RGB Light Block
• And various non-technical blocks such as a lego extension or  wheels

Once the blocks have been used to build a robot – however you define a robot, you can use the free apps to control or code the robot.

Robo Live is an app suitable for kids from 5yrs on and it can be used to control the robot elements in a very simple fashion. On the screen, you can arrange simple elements such as sliders and buttons which then connect to the respective blocks and control them. Thsi way you easily control the motors, servos or the RGB light for example.

The second app is called Robo Code and is the more advanced, coding app. It is suitable for kids from 6 years on and allows your kids to define sequences of actions and to react to the events such as a distance sensor. 

Besides having a really compelling edtech solution consisting of the robot hardware and the apps, there are also teaching materials available that help educators to apply this in class.

We have a voucher code waiting for that will give you 10% off at the end of the interview! So be sure to listen to this episode!

Shownotes

• Anna Iarotska on LinkedIn
• The Spark Award [German]
• Robo Wunderkind
• Interview on Female One Zero
• Mitchel Resnick’s Creative Learning Spiral
• Robo Wunderkind Education Main Page with Curriculum Links
• Robo Wunderkind Getting Started Guide
• Robo Wunderkind Teacher’s Guide
• ReDi School of Digital Integration