Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Launch Pad – Proto Palette Start”.
So hi uh, my name is, will pimble and pearson it went so well in my head. I’M will pimble once upon a time i made a roller coaster in my backyard. Then i made one at a friend’s house. Then i made one in my front yard. Grown-Ups are always asking me why i build crazy stuff.
You guys all know why i’m a maker! I was born that way. Kids, never ask me why i build crazy stuff. Kids are makers, they ask me how, as an entrepreneur as a maker and as a dad, i’m driven to share what i’ve learned to help grown-ups, become makers and to help kids stay that way. Ben you’re gon na have to do the slide thing. This thing doesn’t work for at all. This is carl, my partner carl’s, a true maker. A lot of people have a dining room table where the laser cutter ought to be. Not carl carl is a man who knows what’s important in life.
Last year, carl – and i tried to make some things with arduino and we both gave up keeping things. Keeping things sorted out or even held together was just a nightmare. I called it.
The organizational fire swamp carl and i put our heads together and we had to solve this. We called our idea proto palette, a beautiful solution to an important problem with protopalate. Everything is at your fingertips and you can go through the fire swamp immediately and go from having an idea to making it come true in no time protopalate has everything you need built in.
It’S got. Toggle switches, momentary buttons, three different kinds of potentiometers: rocker switches, 36, leds, infrared and ultrasonic sensors, a tilt sensor, a compass, an accelerometer, rf antennas, thumb slide joysticks all built in and it all stays in the same place every time if it doesn’t have what you need There are 13 patent pending module, swatches that let you wire up anything you can imagine. We took it to kickstarter to fund our first batch and that went pretty. Well, then we went to maker faire in new york. Here’S a picture of carl right before the show opened. We had no idea that we wouldn’t get a chance to sit down or stop doing demos for the next two days straight.
Thousands of people told us that they loved this thing. Thousands of people told us that they got it. Proto palette made things make sense.
The really cool part was how much kids loved it. I’M coaster dad right. I bring physics, family and fun to kids everywhere.
That’S my youtube. Tagline and millions of people know me that way, and here we were me and carl, at maker faire in new york having just built a way to teach kids how to make amazing things with microcontrollers. So we decided then, and there to look into this to find out what was going on. We discovered that eric schmidt, google, chairman put 15 000 microcontrollers into schools across the uk. Here’S some kids from code.org teaching president obama, a thing or two lego – makes programmable toys. Now and my kid lyle uses them in his robotics class across the world, classrooms are becoming maker spaces and students are becoming teachers. These kids are pioneers actual and whole, and now they need affordable, expandable, ed tech and a flexible supportive ecosystem where they can thrive. Proto palette start is that edtech, simpler than the original, affordable and still incredibly expandable, it’s great fun to build things with protopalette start.
We also want to help kids make their own toys and that’s why we’re so excited to launch a line of project kits and proto. Palette start right here at makercon, with sustainability in mind. Our retail packaging is the project box. Speaking of retail, you can buy proto pallet start at makershed.com right now and at the maker shed store this weekend in terms of distribution.
That’S just the start. You’Ll find a growing community user manuals tutorials and lessons online at protopalette.com. My daughter ellie joined the team to teach her friends how to make and to code.
She has no idea how many friends she’s about to have. Naturally everything we do at protopalette.com is available for free. If you went back 100 years, the only thing you’d find familiar is a classroom 200 years same thing.
I think we can do better. I think we have to we’ll continue growing our project library and connecting with this expanding market. Our customers and students will become makers and teachers, we’re writing summer camp and workshop curricula that we’ll share with anyone who wants it. We will work tirelessly to realize our buy one, give one vision for this and other proto pallet products if you’ve got great edtech and only the one percent can afford it. You’Re, probably missing the market and you’re absolutely missing the point. That’S not us! We want everybody in the tent. Well, i’m sorry to interrupt. That might be a good point to end on here.
We’Re we’re over time but uh any last things you want. You want to say before we have some questions from our judges, i’m good! I think the video at the beginning did the whole thing all right, judges, some questions. I think it’s great. I love it.
Thank you and um. I love. I love the friendly design as well. Um thanks.
We built it you’re working on something really important. I love your thought process and i love your passion for it that’s very kind. Thank you. We built it. The reason it’s in the shape of an artist palette is when kids move kind of into middle school. They stop identifying themselves as artists, but the parents. You know i look at my 13 year old and i see a six-year-old right, and so my kid is still a beautiful little kid artist and so part of the reason we built it. That way was so that we could continue to connect with parents and not scare the hell out of them when they see some square blinky box. We wanted it to be accessible so so for the students who um for this when they look at the proto palette and they see sort of a foreign object, what do you what and they don’t have access to rollercoaster dad? What content do you also have that takes these students from zero to being able to leverage this amazing piece of technology? Sure well well, my primary! If i could set this down my primary way of communicating anything to to somebody, i don’t know, is through youtube, and so we’ve got a youtube channel youtube. Slash proto palette ellie is making tutorials that teach everything from this is a switch um through breadboards through potentiometers and all of that, and so we we teach individual components and then we do projects blink, basically we’re going through the entire arduino example catalog and publishing videos To teach those things one thing at a time what we found is when kids see it when the first one came out of the box at my house and – and my house is where there’s like, always, i’m always like feeding kids.
Usually some of them are mine. Um but um when the first thing comes out of the box, kids aren’t afraid of it, they’re not off put by it. It’S art, it’s artistic, it’s a palette. It invites them to get more involved. They want to know what it is when you want to make something. Often it’s like not the same form factor as the palette.
How do you kind of transition from the palette form factor to something that you know need sensor here and a motor here or something like that sure when you want to build something with arduino right, you get out the blue tape and and off you go right. So so what proto palette is designed for from from a maker’s perspective, we say you know built for geeks loved by normals, if you’re, if you’re a geek and you’re building something what you can do is you can attach all your bits and pieces to proto palette Load up your code watch it do the things you want it to do and at that point you can bring your proto palette to someone and show them, or you can start to build your project kit and transpose those components into whatever your final project box is. It’S a prototyping platform that keeps you away from that bucket of i’m not touching that stuff, even though i have a great idea, um is your business to sell proto pallet and the whole uh invent your own thing, uh product or these kits, which remind me very Much of a period where radioshack made kits that came in their own packaging right um, we we come from. We come from part of our background.
I’Ve got a couple, but um part of our background is consumer electronics, and so we understand the consumer, electronics distribution model and so we’re going in that direction in terms of selling actual boxes, we’re also creating education and curricula for schools and maker spaces. We’Re also in concord, starting next month – conquer california, we’re also building our own maker space so that we can start so that we will have a lab so that we’re better equipped to build curricula and teach this stuff. This is, this is more than a business for us. I have stopped trying to change the public school system and i am just creating one of my own. All right, i think that’ll do it will pebble ceo from protopalette edtech. Thank you very much great presentation.
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