Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Pitches with Prototypes: LightUP”.
We’Re light up and we’re empowering hands-on sorry we’re light up and we’re democratizing hands-on learning. My name is josh. I’M a teacher and taren’s an engineer. We met at a research lab at educational research lab at stanford, where we discovered a big problem. Electronics are accessible to only a select few when kids want to learn electronics. They often have to decipher things like this and that’s a big problem, because without expert guidance, this can be really intimidating and get you know, kids lost along the way. We want to empower kids to solve the challenges of the future, even when there isn’t someone nearby to teach them and that’s why we created light up light up is a powerful combination of hardware and software. On the hardware side we have electronic building blocks and on the software side we have the first ever real-time tutor for electronics. Without anyone nearby, you know needed to actually teach so i’m going to let tomas give you a quick demo.
Our parts are a bit small. So it’s not really suitable for an onstage demo but feel free to check us out at the pavilion after this. Oh, let’s see, if my videos will play oh good, okay, so light-ups blocks connect magnetically in either in either direction. So kids are really have quite many options when they’re building a circuit, so here tomas, wants to make a motor spin light up.
Block also make light of blocks also make it very easy for him to change the circuit. So here he’s going to add a button to control to control current flow to the motor. Now, what if tomas makes a mistake well light up’s interactive tutor is their tail, so heretomas has connected an led backwards, so there’s no current flowing. He takes a picture using a light-up tap and it tells him what what went wrong now when tomas fixes fixes his mistake.
Light up light up gives him x-ray vision like being able to see current flow now light up. Let’S uh tomas uses the same. Oh sorry lighter: let’s tamas use the same components and chips that real engineers use, so he can build more advanced projects. Uh here he’s programming, i’m using our arduino compatible block and our programming wand just connects it to the top, and here he’s going to make a musical instrument that he can control just by waving his hand. Sorry, i think maybe the speaker wasn’t turned on, but you hear sound now going kind of trust me. I don’t remember exactly so. Let me just give you a brief recap of light. Up’S key features on the hardware side. Kids can make something that does something so magnetic blocks. Arduino, compatible and modular blocks that are component specific, so kids have complete control over what they’re building. Now, on the software side, we have the ability to debug kid circuits in real time, an interactive simulator that we will eventually have plugged into ng spice the industry standard and guided lessons. So we’ve taken light up into the world and into the hands of hundreds of kids, parents and teachers, people from all walks of life love light up from young, too old yeah.
I also chuckled when he said that, but it’s a real quote now we’re going to start by bringing light up to america, there are 56 million school children in the united states and 21 million children in our target age group middle school and we’re going to reach These kids, by uh, by uh in three places at homes, at tech camps and at schools after developing early prototypes of light up last summer, getting feedback from kids at local events and working with accelerator, a startup accelerator. Actually, in shenzhen china we’re ready to launch light up we’re going to reach kids at home first by launching on kickstarter this thursday. Shortly after we’ll be working with partner, schools and tech camps in the bay area to develop educational kits, that can be used by teachers and instructors, and we plan to deliver our first batch of kits to our kickstarter backers in december. In time.
For christmas kits will range in price from 30 to 300. Each kit will allow you to build more, allow kids to build more complex projects, but all of our blocks are compatible with each other and just some examples. An alarm for your lunch box, a tv, remote and many many more so we’re light up. Our mission is to bring electronics literacy to the world and we’re going to accomplish that by democratizing hands-on learning we’re launching on kickstarter this thursday.
So please support us and please come talk to us afterwards at the prototype pavilion. Thank you very much. .