We went live at noon EST today: www.kickstarter.com/projects/narwhaledu/robots-drawing-and-engineering-an-online-course. Cappie came running in the door today just as Nancy was poised over the launch button, and our campaign will run for 30 days.

We have been covered on hackaday and hackthings (thanks so much to them!):

http://hackaday.com/2013/11/22/learn-engineering-and-draw-narwhals talks a bit about the technical details (whee SCARA arms!)

http://www.hackthings.com/engineering-is-creative-says-narwhal-the-robot-that-can-draw/ talks a bit about our thesis, that engineering is fundamentally creative, and about how this all started!

Again, if you know people who’d be interested, please let them know — apparently the most engagement comes from facebook shares (and hopefully talking in real life!). Support of any amount helps us reach the “popular” page on kickstarter, which in turns means more people who would like to learn about drawing robots and engineering will hear about it.

Thanks so much everyone for all your support! We’d love to get your feedback.

Hello all! NarwhalEdu, if you don’t remember, is creating a hands-on online introduction to engineering course.

What we are up to: planning our kickstarter. It’ll probably be out in about 2 weeks due to various verification steps which are surprisingly complicated. No one mentions these when they talk about kickstarter!

Oh, we did decide to do a kickstarter. What happened to working with homeschoolers and with teachers? We still want to do so, but are pursuing them at a lower priority level because they take longer to make decisions. They require a sort of lower-intensity longer-burn which is taking a backseat for two weeks while we get our kickstarter  campaign up and running.

Since the last update, we:

Did not win the pitch your prototype contest! The winner was a company addressing jaundice in newborns, so I don’t feel too bad. We could have used the money, but it is going to a good cause

Went to maker faire

Went to NERC, the Northeast Robotics Colloquim

http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/kdantu/nerc/

Went to MassCUE, the largest edtech conference in the New England region.

It was held in Gillette Stadium. Everyone really loved Nadra, our plushie Narwhal

Worked on the EdX course and beta-tested it with a lot of MIT undergraduates.

Started working on our kickstarter campaign.

Cappie assembling in 15 minutes! We had two cameras running.

To get a kickstarter project, we need an Amazon Business Payments account. Well, we have to jump through a few hoops to get our Amazon Business Payments account verified*. We need to open a company business account, because that is a Good Thing. It turns out to be a Very Bad Thing to use a personal bank account for C Corp matters.

What’s next? Improving the course, making the kickstarter video, one final revision of the design to standardize bolts, ordering a ton of parts, and then crossing our fingers and hoping we can find 100 students for the course starting February 2014.

* Turns out they want mail addressed to our physical address, which doesn’t take mail. We’re working on that, though. Jeffrey Warren (http://publiclab.org/) made this sweet mailbox and we’ll see if the post office will start delivering to our address:

Oh! Obligatory picture of students working with our robots. This was in August in NJ.

So, what can you do? Sign up for our mailing list if you’re interested (on the homepage), talk to your friends about it, and support our kickstarter campaign in two weeks

Hi, Nancy here. I’m at the hardware innovation workshop this early Wednesday morning on September 18th, 2013.

We’re one of six Pitch Your Prototype Finalists and I will be giving a pitch I’m told around 6pm. We’re up against firefly newborn phototherapy, grow cubes, keen vent, makelastic, and quench equitable smart water dispenser as the other finalists (NarwhalEdu’s product is listed as “CopyCat”, the name for the drawing robot arm), and one of us walks away with 5k based on in-person audience vote. I feel a bit stressed, but I am happy just to be here so regardless it is a win for NarwhalEdu.

Livestream here: http://www.ustream.tv/makelive

Agenda here: http://makezine.com/hardware-innovation-workshop/2013-new-york-event/agenda/

Wish us luck!

 

Giant Narwhal Plushie Present

It was Nancy’s birthday recently and her cofounders Cappie and Hanna surprised her with  a giant narwhal plushie. It’s our new mascot!

It came in a giant box

Here it is hard at work.

Here is a size reference. It’s AWESOME.

Logo Design Tips

After a few days of hard work, our logo was developed.

It started out ignonimously, like this

and rapidly progressed:

 

 

 

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