To me, cross-functional teams, that’s the strength, and having someone like a product manager, or CEO role, that would be their job, is how do I find a consumer? How do I create, now, a revenue model, etc.?
I think it’s really important, because I saw a lot of people who either think revenue is bad, charging money is bad. "Because I’m doing something for good, it should be free." There needs to be a balance.
I don’t know if you guys have heard of Scratch?
Oh, Mitch Resnick?
Mitch Resnick. I did an internship as part of MIT Media Lab. I saw a little bit of what their teams did. That was one of the more, I think, phenomenas where they didn’t really plan for it to grow so quickly and latch on, but they were able to key into something.
Which was that teachers were scared to teach coding, because most of them didn’t really know how to code. They’ve created something that teachers can learn and feel confident in teaching.
I think that was a product-market fit that was just the perfect mix. A lot of times, products don’t have that organically, the perfect fit. You need someone to explore intentionally, and then maybe adjust the product or find a different market, and grow it from there.
Lego is one of the primary sponsors. I believe it’s called also the Lego Lab.
I don’t know.
Actually, I think Scratch in particular, I’m not sure.
Yes. I was going to say, Mitch and I think other people of that lab have made Mindstorms, and other more directly Lego-related products. I believe Scratch maybe was inspired as well, because block-based programming, it’s Lego blocks.
I’m not sure what the benefit is, otherwise. I think it’s just philanthropy.
There’s definitely a correlation. No.
Actually, I think that the benefit is that Lego is an educational toy, so it’s all about supporting STEM and those things, which are very popular in these days.
Scratch Junior, you mean?
The app?
There’s co-play. Hopefully, the kids can actually, because the problem with children, especially someone who’s five or under, their fingers are not very precise. You need a large touch area, or they get really frustrated.
Apple pencil. I think they need to first know how to hold an object, so probably more grade one, two.
Right now, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m currently creating apps for babies.
Oh, really?
Yeah, Sago mini. It’s actually right around the corner.
Oh, that’s a marketing thing.
Oh, that’s embarrassing, but yeah. It was influenced by Apple, but we recently added an AR feature. I found that to be very tough, because four-year-olds don’t understand AR.
They don’t yet know what’s supposed to be in reality.
Exactly, so they think when they see through the camera, it’s there, and they don’t understand that that’s an effect in place. The other thing is, they don’t always hold the tablet properly, because theyir hands are small. A lot of times, a tablet is face down on the table.
This all goes back to product-market fit.
Just because the technology exists, you need to understand the need for it, and what the audience is gaining from it. Is the audience ready to use it? Just as I found as well for smartphones, for different spectrums of homelessness, there’s different needs, and a different mental capacity.
Basically, what can they do with a smartphone at that stage in their life? That’s what I realized very quickly. I had this dream of, "Oh, once you have a smartphone, you can write your resume on there, and apply to jobs through it."
A lot of people are not ready for that. A lot of people, even just watching YouTube videos, that helps them feel normal. That was step one.
I was very changed by that experience.
I wish I could do more of that in my everyday life, which is parking my own bias aside, and then getting in touch with more different groups of people, and understanding they think differently from me. Their needs are not the same.
When they wake up, they’re thinking of other things, like, "Do I have a shelter for my kid to live in next month?" Once you can empathize, it changes the conversation you’d have.
And of course, what I can do for them, or what they can teach me.
Not traditional ethnography, but I’ve done a lot of design thinking workshops, which is more about...From IDEO, that kind of framework.
And the spaces in there.
I never thought about the space, but that makes a lot of sense. Even recently, I was thinking about food, and how food is a reflection of your culture and your history. That could be a way of people don’t know a lot about cultures. I was thinking, food is the common thing that, or usually, the first contact people have.
Say Mexican or Korean food. For people in Toronto, that’s their first contact with Korea etc. I was thinking, how could you use that first experience to introduce someone to even deeper cultural significance, or get them interested in that culture? This space is a new one that I thought of.
Bata Shoe Museum.
It is, yeah.
I like that analogy.
I just want to talk a little bit about funding, and about funding issues. There’s two things. One is, have you connected a lot of the different groups, whether it’s social enterprise, or the civic tech groups to, I guess, more traditional...?
Just private companies. The HTCs of the world, that kind of companies.
Are they interested in funding?
Yeah.
Where social capital doesn’t mean much.
Pitching to different audiences.
Wow, I like that a lot. I have so many thoughts to share. It’s not really a high school, but there is another school in Boston called NuVu studio. It’s immersive in the sense that all day, the students just create a product or something completely innovative and different, that is very practical.
Not theory-based at all, and they start very early as well. I know that there’s a lot of curriculum changes happening in San Francisco. I haven’t seen one that’s, "This is the best idea. This is the best solution," but I could see that there’s already a lot of experimentation in open-ended learning, or project-based learning.
I’ve seen the shortcomings as well, which is it’s hard to have a consistent quality of experience. I’m excited towards that kind of education, for sure.
It depends on your age. For example, Montessori, so Maria Montessori, right? It’s all about letting the child guide their experience. Then the teacher is the facilitator. I think that at that age, it’s very important to foster the sense of curiosity, mastery, and independence for the kid to feel confident and brave approaching things they’re not familiar with.
