Dear all,

As you probably noticed the kickstarter ended a few days ago, and we successfully hit our stretch goal with a few hours to spare! Thanks so much everyone for all your support. We’re throwing in a fourth servo for those who are participating in the course and throwing in an extra sticker for everyone in thanks.

We are really excited to be able to build robots and share our love of engineering with so many people. We’re a little apprehensive, since we want things to be perfect for everyone, but as it’s very hard to predict how people will react to different styles of teaching we’ll give it give it our best and see what happens.

Now we go onwards into the future! We’ve already got a sample for the laser-cut pieces from E&M Labs in California and have firm quotes or have bought from our suppliers for all the other pieces, although we are still looking at our options for the 3d printed pen holder piece. We’re putting together a game plan for producing the course and are looking into options for filming in a quieter place than our day-to-day workspace.

As usual, here are some screenshots of the backend:

Funding Progress Graph

 

This time there’s actually a single source (sidebar, $229) cut-off from the bottom of the graph.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We’ll shortly send out surveys via Kickstarter to collect shipping information, email addresses, or t-shirt sizes as appropriate.

Merry xmas, those of you that celebrate it, and happy holidays to everyone else!

We wish you all great happiness and joy,

–Cappie and Nancy

p.s. Here are two talks about education that we found interesting: Sal Khan’s talk at MIT that started this whole project, and Blikstein and Sipitakiat’s talk about design principles for engineering education hardware.