Giving kids the keys to their kingdom
on empowerment and education through love and community
I remember distinctly when being a programmer became cool with my friends. It was a remarkable experience as it happened during a summer at the Jersey shore… me being a computer programmer became crazy relevant as everyone needed to know HTML in order to spice up their MySpace pages. My career choice had previously been cause for great concern and embarrassment, so this really upped my social ante.
With the sudden dawn of MySpace many young ladies across the world were instant markup experts so that they could express themselves with
which have sadly now been banished to the dark corners of the web next to marquees and midi players.
Another such phenomenon has been Minecraft. Despite looking like some 16 bit lego ripoff this game is huge with the kids.
Minecraft was built to be collaborative — it wasn’t built as an educational tool. That happened by accident because kids found something they loved and had the ability to make it their own.
Turns out Minecraft teaches kids to code and build servers. Kids make all kinds of things from plugins that protect their servers from Trolls (called “Anti Griefing tools”), they can enhance or remove the server chat platform, they can teleport from one area of the server to another, they even have their own developer tools. There are hundreds of thousands of plugins for Minecraft made by players.
These things are crazy hardcore too, they aren’t built in Scratch or Lucy or whatever other kids languages are out there they are built in Java. Kids that are in middle school are teaching themselves Java so they can better communicate with their friends.
We can’t force them to take the classes to learn how to do this. In 2011 out of approximately 20 million HS Students in the US 3,101 took AP Computer Science. .002% of HS Students in the US take AP Computer Science.
When I was 12 I taught myself how to code because I had no friends and I figured out that I could make my computer call someone else’s computer. It was a community that drew me out, it never entered my mind that this was something hard, or only for adults. I can relate to these kids who are finding something that improves their lives and becoming super technical along the way.
For a long time I’ve wondered — if we make a product that kids love and give them the means to manipulate it, can we get them more excited about technology?
Enter: Jewelbots
For the past year I have been working on exactly that. Trying to brainstorm the perfect sandbox for kids that will incentivize them to learn on their own. Something that combines fun and community.
I’ve spent a lot of time with teenaged girls, which is crazy fun. I have been introduced to their world and have observed the things that are important to them. I’ve seen them prioritize what they wear, who they are with, and anything that will give them autonomy and ownership of their world.
I wanted to encompass those priorities into this project. We are aiming at smart friendship jewelry for teenaged girls that introduce them to basic engineering concepts and empower them to learn a lot more if they are interested. The jewelry will enable them to communicate with their friends, express themselves, and create their own world with their friend groups in a language that is theirs exclusively.
In September, with the blessing of Flatiron School, Jewelbots joined Highway1 to be a part of their third cohort. We are joining great companies like Ringly and Birdi in a quest to ship amazing hardware that changes the world.
I have two incredible partners in this mission. Maria Paula Saba, an amazing UI designer and hardware prototyper from Brazil, just graduated ITP with her Masters in July and as part of her thesis she presented Jewelbots. She is the woman behind product, and is a force of nature.
We also just brought on Ailar Javadi, who has her masters in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and will be leading the charge on operations and managing the manufacturing process. She is a clear light in the world of uncertainty that is productizing hardware.
I’m super excited about this team, and crazy lucky to be working with such brilliant women on the mission I have dedicated a career to.
We are learning a ton in this program alongside some amazing companies like Moxxly, Shadowman, Switchmate and Peep. I will be sharing more about our learnings soon, but this blog post is long enough already. More to come.
If you want to help follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and send us some emails.
