With only a core team of three members, Awesome Shield has proven itself to make a difference in the toy industry in the past two years. The three founders of this startup company didn’t have any experience on setting up an educational startup before but they managed to launch a successful Kickstarter campaign and show parents that there’s a better way of teaching kids how to code at their own pace.
Powered by Arduino, Awesome Shield teaches kids how to code for hardware. Offering parents and children 100 online video tutorials, a simplified code and a custom hardware, children can easily create hands-on projects. These tutorials teach kids the basics of coding with a touch of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math, the simplified code guides the kids on the fundamentals while the hardware brings the code to life through its light, color, sound and sensors. By working on each project, children are able to develop important learning skills that will eventually help them as they get older.
In this exclusive interview with the founders of Awesome Shield, they share their journey from starting this business to delivering their products after their successful Kickstart campaign. They’ve also expressed their thoughts on the future of the toy industry and shared their advice on how to make a difference in this world for young engineers.
THE PEOPLE
Introduce yourself
The core Awesome Shield team consists of three founders, two Canadian brothers and a German. We’re registered in Germany as U.G. which is a simple type of limited liability company popular with small businesses and startups.
How many years have you been working in your industry?
None of us had direct experience with building an educational startup before we created Awesome Shield but we’ve all had a tapestry of relevant professional experiences in the private sector. The three of us had collaborated on a startup and when that failed we knew the real magic lay in the team we’d created.
Our CEO is an Engineering Chemist by training which gives us a solid science background for teaching grade school science concepts. Our UX Designer and and our developer each have over a decade of professional experience.
THE COMPANY
Describe your company.
Our company structure is quite flat. The three founders take on projects as their availability and skill sets allow. The CEO is full time the other two are part time. We’re a small team doing an ambitious amount of work, so there’s necessarily a lot of flexibility in terms of who does what.
We’ve been working on Awesome Shield for approximately two years. We have been developing the learning platform and hardware through a series of workshops that we use to do testing and gather feedback. We ran a Kickstarter campaign in May 2016 and are delivering the hardware and our first learning videos in December 2016.
We have several unofficial advisers that we consult with on an individual basis as needed – people with deep professional experience that compliment our team’s experience (in Marketing, Business Development, and Education).
The core team, of three, is based in Berlin. We share a tiny office in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood. We have also had the good fortune and pleasure of collaborating with a group of extremely talented interns, freelancers, friends, and family. Our manufacturer, Watterott Electronics, has also been a major asset, generously sharing insights and expertise during preparations for manufacturing.
Describe your mission, vision and values.
Our mission is to equip kids (aged 10-100) with the skills to invent the world they want to live in. Our first product is a learning kit that teaches kids to code while building fun projects (a theremin, lock box alarm, candle, etc.). While kids build and code, they learn about the math and science behind their projects.
Even though we’re a small team, we work hard to be inclusive, transparent, and act as what we view as a moral company. We strive to treat each other with kindness and understanding and we do the same for those we work with.
Where is this company headed? What are your future expansion plans?
The future is difficult to predict. That’s one reason why we focus on teaching deep skills and new ways to look at the world, rather than more prescriptive rote learning. Our feeling is that if you’re well equipped to understand and contribute to the world you can participate in the creation of the future rather than just being an observer or consumer.
To that end, we’d love to grow Awesome Shield, while staying focused on our mission. The bigger our community is, and the more resources we have, the more kids we can empower.
INTRODUCTION
What do you think is the future of the toy industry?
One trend we see a lot of is the consumerization of technology. Things are becoming more polished and “magical”. But technology isn’t magic. It’s engineering, science, maths, and creativity. We’ve seen educational toys move in that polished direction as well and while it has a place (and we certainly strive for approachability ourselves) we think it’s important to demystify tech for kids and empower them to become makers, instead of just consumers.
How will today’s toys and gadgets make a difference as compared to the ones from the
past?
There’s a wonderful focus on coding that is developing. Especially in terms of teaching coding logic to really young kids – which is something that’s quite new and really exciting to see.
Today’s toys and gadgets need to help kids learn about programming, and also explore making in an interdisciplinary way.
As soon as you start inventing, you realize that it’s impossible to separate coding, science, math, art, and crafting. We see Awesome Shield as a new kind of educational kit that helps kids explore these areas holistically, while creating inventions.
Which toy/gadget from your childhood made an impact on you while growing up?
LEGO was a big one. It’s so customisable that you can really pour your imagination into it. It’s so important in learning to be able to make things your own. LEGO also helped us explore the power of iteration. Trying a design, testing it, identifying weaknesses, and then making improvements is a powerful process that LEGO helped us explore as kids.
THE PRODUCT
What’s the inspiration behind your products?
Before we started Awesome Shield, we often spent weekends doing little hack projects – playing around with Arduino and Raspberry Pi – to build little tools and gadgets for our homes and office.
Awesome Shield began two years ago as a major pivot from a previous joint project in which we were building a process monitoring and automation system for microbrewers. While testing different designs, we developed a simplified code and hardware system that let us create and test prototypes very quickly. We realized that its simplicity could also make it a great tool for beginners. A big turning point was when we used it to explain coding to a cousin and realised that it had a tonne of potential as a learning tool.
Since then we’ve been testing and adapting our teaching methodology, hardware, and software. Through many iterations, we arrived at Awesome Shield.
Which group is your target market and why?
Kids and Teenagers are our core market. We feel that you can have the biggest impact on a person’s life at this point. Also through our workshops and speaking with educators, we found that if you make an educational product for someone that’s 10 years old (and you don’t talk down to them), most people who are 10 and up will find the experience approachable and engaging.
What are the future innovations that you or your company are pursuing?
Right now we’re pretty laser focused on finishing our first product and are excited to hear from our Kickstarter backers what they think. We know we’re going to learn a tonne from them once we get the product into their hands, and their feedback will help us identify our immediate next steps towards improving Awesome Shield.
Long term, our goal is to develop an ecosystem of learning kits around interesting invention themes like musical instruments, botany, games, and robots. The opportunities for learning by combining STEAM and building physical projects are myriad.
Do you think your product has made an impact on your customers and in your industry?
After two years of running workshops we’ve taught more than 600 people to write their first lines of code. There have been a lot of really special moments in there where people achieved things they didn’t think were possible for them to accomplish. We’re looking forward to delivering on our Kickstarter and sharing that empowerment with even more people. We’re also very excited to have a standalone product. We can only reach so many kids through events. Having a kit that kids can use to learn at home will really help us reach even more people.
What makes your product different from your competitors?
Awesome Shield helps make coding hands-on through hardware and invention. This helps kids be more excited and engaged than they are with many purely digital learn-to-code products.
Awesome Shield brings the power of Arduino (which is used by pros worldwide in everything from science experiments to art installations) to kids who are 10 and older. We make this powerful tech fun and accessible.
Many other products for this age group put kids in a sandbox and teach them to invent with tools that limit the scope of what they can accomplish. Awesome Shield makes it easy for kids to start using powerful tools right away which they can build on to create anything they can imagine.
THE CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS
What challenges did your company face while developing your product?
We’re doing what’s called “bootstrapping” in the startup world, which basically means that most of our team is working on Awesome Shield part time while we earn our living elsewhere. This lets us focus entirely on creating the company (rather than, for example spending time finding inventors) but it also really limits the resources (especially time) available to grow the company and build the product. It can often be frustrating not to be able to match the pace of our growth with our vision for Awesome Shield. But this also helps us laser focus on only the most important tasks which has resulted in a honed company and product.
There was also a huge learning curve for us (and still is). When we started, we’d never registered a business, run an education company, or done a round of electronics manufacturing.
How did your company overcome these challenges?
We learned a lot by asking experts for advice and through loads of trial, error, and iteration.
In the educational space, we ran workshops, spoke with educators, and did a bunch of reading and thinking to discover an educational approach that folks really love.
On the hardware front, we kept the product simple and then just started making things and reading and again talking to experts. A brilliant electrical engineer that does freelance work with us and our manufacturer both helped to fill in the gaps here. And our CEO really stepped up to the plate and did a tonne of learning.
ADVICE TO THE YOUNG ENGINEERS
You can do it. Pick something you’re interested in or solve a problem you see in the world. And just start chipping away at it – learn while you go and don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know yet. Find some other folks to collaborate with who compliment your strengths and weaknesses. Don’t be afraid to try new things, and iterate on your ideas. Pretty soon you’ll be blown away by the impact you’ve had on the world!
