How To Keep Kids Inspired During Quarantine

“STEM-thusiast” Nate Ball Recommends Shifting Gears and Thinking Like an Inventor

As pandemic life persists, millions of parents are facing the same daily dilemma: How to keep kids engaged and inspired in a time when so much of the world is off limits. For inventor and father of two Nate Ball, the solution involves equal parts creativity and persistence — and perhaps a handful of rubber bands and a couple balloons.

Ball is a mechanical engineer, beatboxer, pole-vaulter and self-described “STEM-thusiast.” He’s also an Emmy award-winning co-host of the PBS kids’ show, Design Squad Global. He became a builder and inventor early in life, and as a college student won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for invention. This led to Atlas Devices, a company Ball founded with his classmates that creates “real-life superhero gadgets for real-life superheroes,” like first responders and soldiers in the field.

We spoke to Ball about his latest initiative to reach students through livestream videos of invention projects that he films in his home workshop. And we asked what advice he has for parents and educators to encourage kids to explore STEM-based building and learning while in quarantine.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Tell us about the livestream show for kids that you’ve been leading on Facebook.

My aim was to invite people into my workshop and to build stuff that’s fun and cool and made from materials that you find around the house. Making exciting stuff gives you a reason to be resourceful. Like, if a kid is thinking, “Oh man, I want to build a fully-automatic slingshot trap that will fire a little ping pong ball at my sibling when they sneak in my room,” that kind of kid-initiated idea is the perfect start.

You can actually build that out of cardboard and duct tape and rubber bands and ping pong balls if you have a bit of engineering skills, some imagination and some persistence. My hope is to expand kids’ horizons and give them a taste of what the invention process can be like in a very real way that’s also accessible.

How were you inspired to start this while kids are learning from home during the pandemic?

One of my favorite things is to go into schools and to give presentations to kids and give them a very tangible taste of what it can be like to be well equipped to bring ideas out of your head into reality. And I’ve wanted to do that on a bigger scale for a long time.

Then all of a sudden, when we all had to stay at home during the pandemic, I thought it’s time to start playing with this right now, to share the kind of stuff that we do at our own house with my own kids. It was a great chance to give families a vehicle to have some fun and get their kids away from screens — at least after they’re done watching the live stream — and be doing something a bit more independently that they can naturally learn from.

How has it been different than the television work you’ve done with PBS’s Design Squad?

Through Design Squad, we show the design process, we show some of the failures that I experience when I’m building, but it’s still edited. You’re still packaging that experience. So this livestream is utterly raw. I’m intentionally not planning the entire build-out in full detail because I kind of don’t want it to go perfectly smoothly. I enjoy the moments when I get surprised with a failed attempt at building something and I get to share that in a really real way.

While kids are out of school, how are you trying to ensure that this content is accessible to everyone, regardless of their home circumstances?

One of the big concerns that’s on a lot of people’s minds is what’s happening in families that are drastically differently equipped to weather all of this. I’m trying to do a few things to help make it more accessible. I’m very intentionally building all of the challenges around stuff that most people have access to at home, keeping it to big ideas with small materials.

In terms of access, keeping it free is key. In some of the livestreams, I show people where you can find more resources. There’s a whole “parents and educators” section of the website on Design Squad. But it’s harder to provide equal opportunities now that kids are at home, and I think a lot of great, deeply caring educators and parents and people are trying to figure out how to get this content to every kid. I’m also uploading recordings of the live streamed show to my YouTube channel to provide broader access for people who aren’t active on Facebook.

What advice do you have for parents to help step into that role of teaching at home?

Another part of why I want to do this is for parents, because I know they’re watching too. My hope is I’ll model some of the behaviors that can be productive to help kids learn by making things. It’s been interesting to notice what comes up in me as I watch my own kids having their own natural struggles, and holy cow, it’s hard. If you’re really committed to developing resilience and resourcefulness in your kids, you’ve got to not step in and save them too much.

Be ready for a couple of things. First of all, know that your best value is in helping facilitate their own learning experience, not teaching them stuff. The learning will naturally happen. Think about it as playing the long game. In the short term, kids are going to get really upset when their stuff doesn’t work. But it is so, so worth it. It’s not about trying not to get mad when things didn’t work. My goodness, of course you’re mad. Be mad about it. And then let’s look at what actually happened.

How do you prepare them to deal with failure and uncertainty?

We’re all dealing with these new, different and rapidly changing circumstances. I realized how this is super familiar territory for me. When you’re making something that’s never been made before, you’re just completely overwhelmed with uncertainty the whole time. You don’t know if anything is going to work. Having your expectations and hopes not be met, there’s nothing more core to inventing and making stuff than that. But I know that if I apply some creativity and some resourcefulness and a lot of persistence, I can navigate it.

Now granted, we also have plenty of challenging moments at our house. I mean, I go into my closet and scream just like every parent these days, several times a day. But it’s a real gift to get the chance to help instill that same hopeful, resilient perspective and worldview and experience in our own kids. The livestream gives kids a contained environment to experience uncertainty and to apply their own resourcefulness and to navigate challenges. The hope is that the project is exciting enough that they’re willing to naturally want to work through those, and of course the best way to find a project like that is to have the idea come from the kid.

How did your own parents instill this in you? What was it like growing up in the Ball household?

I had a really lucky environment to land in with very supportive parents who had some pretty strong convictions about what felt right to them in parenting. They really prioritized my own self-led exploration of the world as well as my sisters. My mom was a career elementary music teacher and piano teacher, my dad did some teaching as well in math and physics.

Two of the things that I noticed about the way they parented us was they seemed to have a very high tolerance compared to many parents for risk. Not like super high, but I was allowed to use hand tools and things as a kid. And the other thing which I really appreciated was just the tolerance for messes, we made so many messes. Their willingness to deal with that inconvenience allowed us a lot more free exploration than I think a lot of kids get.

What started you on the path of building and inventing?

I built all kinds of crazy stuff as a kid, much of which they knew about, not all of which they did. I was very into exciting, kinetic things like slingshots and potato guns and catapults and rockets. My mom got me to go to a Four H class on rocketry. I was in fourth grade at this point. The first project was a pop bottle rocket launcher that you build to launch a rocket made out of a two-liter bottle.

I will tell you that the experience of when you yank that string and launch your first water rocket 75 feet in the air — I know of no more captivating experience a kid’s going to have than that. And of course, your immediate inclination after you’ve calmed down from that initial excitement is, “How do I get this thing to launch even higher?”

You went from building a bottle rocket in elementary school to a Tesla Coil in middle school. How did you make that leap?

The idea of building a machine that created lightning was totally captivating to me. And I remember buying a self-published book called the Tesla Coil Book, which I still have my copy of here. It’s just absolutely falling apart. And I got that book out and it was utterly above my level. Holy cow, I didn’t understand any part of it, but yet I was so driven to make one that I just dove into it. I remember taking that book with me everywhere I went and trying to work on these equations. It took me two-and-a-half years of solid work on that thing with support from an online community around Tesla coil building until I got a spark of any kind.

Your first big invention came from a design challenge at MIT to help with military rescues, which later led to you winning the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in 2007. Tell us about the Atlas Rope Ascender you and your team built.

That’s been the biggest trajectory-shifting invention from my life so far. The request was, “Can’t somebody make those motorized rope climbing devices like we’ve seen in the movies forever, you know, like Batman and James Bond?” And we saw that challenge and we looked at each other and said, wait, somebody is going to give a little bit of prototyping money to try to build that? Heck yeah, let’s do it.

A week prior to competition, we were doing a performance check. We’re up in the indoor track at MIT, and we had the rope attached to a pile of sandbags on the ground. We pull the trigger and the motor spins up super fast, and the sandbags yank up in the air a few feet, and then the whole gearbox explodes and the rope starts to shred. We worked so hard on this thing, and we were so excited, and all in a moment, our hopes and dreams are dashed. So, we stayed up for almost a week straight, and we redesigned and rebuilt it.

And the morning of the competition, we tested it again over the swimming pool. I got to be the first person to go. And, boy, I still remember how that felt like it was yesterday, pulling the trigger and feeling my body getting yanked up in the air at about seven feet per second. Not to mention all the relief of having it actually work after that initial failure.

How did that lead to the founding of your company, Atlas Devices?

We won third prize in the competition and it came with a little bit of prize money. It was just enough for us to file a patent and incorporate our student team as an LLC. Eventually it got some traction from the Army and we got our first contract in 2007, right toward the end of grad school, and the first units that were shipped to the Rangers in Afghanistan.

Years later, Atlas Devices is going strong. We build real-life superhero gadgets for real-life superheroes — rescuers, first responders, Special Operations Forces, utility workers and people like that. There are many people around the world using stuff we’ve developed to let themselves work higher, faster and safer, and that’s incredibly fulfilling and exciting work.

You took an unconventional path from studying engineering at MIT to starting your own company and then becoming a TV host. Why the shift to television?

Becoming a TV host was a really fun way for me to combine my interest in performing with the challenge that I enjoy of how do I make these incredibly cool science and engineering concepts relatable to the kids on the show and to all the viewers at the same time. There is some irony because the whole reason I grew up making stuff was because we didn’t have TV at home, one of my parents’ other key parenting choices. We did get to watch TV once a week at my grandma’s house when we went there for dinner. So I watched pretty much MacGyver.

We can certainly see the MacGyver influence on your work.

Totally. I’ve been trying to channel that. When you think about what MacGyver is bringing to every challenge, he combines this phenomenal skillset with creativity and resourcefulness. How beautiful is that? You can channel any of that when uncertainty comes your way.

What has it been like to hear from kids who have been inspired by your outreach?

That’s one of the most fulfilling experiences in life I’ve ever had. It’s happened a number of times where I’ve run into kids of all ages who have watched Design Squad and have recalled specific moments on the show that really captivated them. And I’ve had kids tell me they went into engineering because of the content they got to experience through Design Squad and through other outreach.

It really makes an impression on kids, and I think it speaks very well to the effort we’ve made to show how diverse engineering can be. It gives everybody a way to connect with the engineering and inventing toolset and how it can be applied to anything they’re interested in.

You bring your other, non-engineering interests to the show, like your talent for beatboxing. Why is that important?

It’s my way of embracing how I feel is the most fun way to work, which is to bring all of yourself. When I’m having more fun, the creativity tends to flow. If you’re into animals or cooking, bring that in. The real beauty is you’re using them for creative self-expression and making stuff in the world to delight yourself or to help people. That’s what it’s all about.

You can watch Nate’s livestream invention projects on his Facebook page or on his YouTube channel.