SBIR-STTR Award

This project entails the design and implementation of a low cost World Maker device that lets students code, create game levels, and engage in other maker activities using everyday objects to ensure all young people can develop the creative confidence to invent. The system uses modern technology to avoid digital screens. Throughout this experience, learners tap into their natural proclivities to make and shape ideas in the non-digital world, and develop the ability to fluently construct new ideas in a technical medium. The commercialization of the World Maker (WM) device will address two, nationally important issues. First, by scaffolding young learners through progressively bringing their ideas into reality, the WM will foster creative confidence: the natural ability to come up with ideas and the courage to act on them. Next, there is a gender gap in innovation and entrepreneurship in the United States. Women patent at 40% the rate of men, only 9% of information technology related patents have one or more female inventors, and only 8% of the beneficiaries of incubators meant to commercialize innovations were women. The WM will address gender equity issues in the maker community (currently 80% male) and by widening pathways to engage in making.The key technical challenges that must be solved include: 1) ensuring that the system can be manufactured at a low price point, 2) the industrial design challenge; creating a device that is portable and not breakable 3) developing applications that will support the overall goals of the WM, and 4) further defining and refining a user experience that teachers/parents will find educationally compelling and children love playing with.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will continually refine and move towards production of this project's Creative Maker Tool, an augmented reality experience where the act of playing is inherently inventing. The system uses modern technology to avoid digital screens. Throughout this experience, learners tap into their natural proclivities to make and shape ideas in the non-digital world, and develop the ability to fluently construct new ideas in a technical medium. The commercialization of this project will address two, nationally important issues. First, by scaffolding young learners through progressively bringing their ideas into reality, this project will foster creative confidence: the natural ability to come up with ideas and the courage to act on them. Next, there is a gender gap in innovation and entrepreneurship in the United States. Women patent at 40% the rate of men, only 9% of information technology related patents have one or more female inventors, and only 8% of the beneficiaries of incubators meant to commercialize innovations were women. This project will address gender equity issues in the maker community (currently 80% male) and by widening pathways to engage in making.The system is composed of a projection system that allows real-time programmable interactions between everyday and virtual objects without a computer screen. Throughout this research, we will create and refine STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) Apps, which are built-in augmented activities where users create small inventions with everyday objects to code interactions and affect program flow or gameplay, develop Augmented Tutorials, bridge seamlessly to existing STEM tools through real-time interfacing, as well as manufacture and prepare the system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.