Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This is for Everyone”.
This is also allen from make magazine here at makercon and we’re talking to beth kobe from technology wool. Savers, hey beth, hello. How are you not too bad? So um? You talked today about the world. Your son is growing up in and the fact that technology is just something he can do.
Do you want to talk a little about that yeah i mean i talked about how my son was born with an ipad which i’m sure a lot of parents can relate to, and that’s exciting and also slightly terrifying for a lot of parents that our kids are Essentially, using these kind of glorified television screens all the time, and although there are great things to put on them, they’re not always used as kind of productive tools and the world of tech is so much bigger than the screen and over and over and over again. When we do things with young people, that is the perception of young people, that technology is a screen and it’s nothing else um, and so obviously we get really excited when we start talking about tech and it’s sensors, you make out of plaster and electronic dough that You make in your kitchen with lemon and salt, and you know not to use the word over and over again but steam. You know these. These skills are real and they’re exciting and we don’t really use that word very often because we don’t think it helps us from a kind of inspiring groups of people that might not care about that. But that’s tech, tech is that broad and that exciting and if we can present that to families and young people in a way that gets them kind of going yeah, that’s a great thing for a generation that will quite frankly need these skills, um and parents that Want to be engaged with these skills just have no way in so um.
You said that the ownership of the technology that they’re putting it together themselves really changes young people’s kids relationship with the technology. Yet uh, do you want to talk about that? Yeah i mean from the beginning of starting the business. We had a kind of thesis around um. Do you feel differently about something when you make it so i have scarves that i’ve knitted they’re, not particularly amazing, feats of knitting, but i still own them, because i don’t want to give them away because i made them my father.
He restores cars. Those cars are not cars, there’s something else, they’re these things which i’m not allowed to touch, and we don’t have that relationship with technology. Some people do that understand it more most people don’t um, and so we had this thesis or this hypothesis around. If you made it, would you care about it more um and some of the insights we’re gathering now and i think it’s you know it takes time to really gather those insights, but you know we get stories of kids that sleep with their speakers. They soldered it. They made it, they designed it and it’s theirs.
They know how to fix it when it breaks it’s their gadget, and i think that, for me, is a really exciting part of essentially our kind of business which, in the end, is about relationships to tech. It’S about relationships to each other, the relationship you have to the thing you made um and i think that’s a pretty big, exciting goal to have um, not just about the making of the thing not just about the skills you acquire, but the relationships that that process Creates so that’s really um, i think what we’re in the midst of understanding, okay, so um, your company is basically based around technologies. It makes technology kits, but you don’t really view it as a technological company. Then that’s not the point yeah we i mean. We call ourselves a design, led tech business, but we focus on learning um, and so yes, technology is the vehicle for doing it, but it’s actually about design user experience, creating really successful user journeys, and i can say this – i think i don’t think many kids in The world ever thought about that and i think that’s a problem. I think it means that it will appeal to a really particular kind of group, a lot of people here, which is great, i think that’s amazing.
It is where a whole generation of engineers came from. I don’t think it’s going to create some of diversity within the tech world that we want. I don’t think it will inspire again a generation that is bombarded with screens to be excited about electronics in the bigger picture. We think if we can create delightful, really engaging user experiences that are bigger than the tech.
That’S a pretty good bet in inspiring a bigger group of people. So along those lines, then you’re involved with the bbc on their make it digital campaign this year. So for the american audience, do you want to you want to talk about that? You want to see what that is, so the bbc is doing um, probably one of the most exciting. I think campaigns ever called the make it digital campaign um the bbc reaches about 98 of the uk population. They have an enormous role to play in uk awareness about anything um, so this focus on digital making and digital skills, and really important that it isn’t about programming. It’S about digital skills in the broadest sense of the word is their focus for 2015.. So as part of that focus, they are partnering with a collection of uk businesses, charities organizations startups. I think it’s about 35 in total, something like that, ranging from google to us to code club to princess trust, um and what they’re doing is shining a spotlight on incredible organizations that are helping to reach young people and basically teach digital skills to the uk population. In addition to that, they’re using programming events and they’re making a product um, so the product that they’re making is something they’re doing with us. So it’s a small group of people so arm samsung, electronics, microsoft, us and freescale and we’re making something called the micro bit. So the micro bit kit is essentially a little smart gadget, an arduino for 12 year olds, if you will – and it is obviously based on a legacy that the bbc had in producing the micro in the 80s, which the arm engineers we work with all learned. Programming on the micro, so almost every i mean we have tons of parents as you can imagine they buy our products. That did the same. I think there’s two things. It’S really telling one is that the micro for this generation is not a computer. I think really really important. It’S a gadget, it’s physical computing, it’s inputs and it’s outputs.
It’S about problem, solving and agency and programming as part of the physical world. I think the second thing that’s really important. Is it’s not the bbc walking in and saying we save the day, it’s them partnering, which is actually a really incredible feat for them, um to basically leverage their platform to do what they do best, which is to change a generation through awareness building bringing this into The homes of a really broad range of people – and i think, that’s really exciting, so we represent in this kind of consortium of businesses the 12 year olds. That’S kind of our role and we’ve brought users into the process, which we feel very strongly and happy that we were able to do um. We don’t want to put a green circuit board in front of a 12 year old girl and say here: get excited about programming, get excited about.
You know, sensors we’re putting something which will look pretty awesome in front of a 12 year old girl that she can wear that she can do tons of stuff with because we really do want to inspire a generation to see this is something they can do. So this will be given to a million 12 year olds in september, which is again something that, like only the bbc, can do um and that’s obviously for us, as a pretty small part of that, is incredible for us to be a part of the process. So that’s really awesome. So thanks for talking to us, thank you. .