Ep. 45: Tom Lauwers of BirdBrain Technologies

Transcription:

Today on our 50 Summer Stories of Pittsburgh Tech with Comcast, we're talking to you Tom Lauwer's of BirdBrain tTchnologies. This is really a cool company, I can't wait to talk about all the fun stuff he's working on. Because he makes me wish I could be like 10 years old again, and nerd out and have fun building cool robots and actually controlling them through zoom now, which I think is pretty cool. That's a big part of our conversation today. And that's why I've been having so much fun telling these stories this summer, because so many great solutions are being improvised out there. And people are navigating this pandemic despite, and Tom has an awesome story. So glad Comcast is allowing me to do that. And I'm your host, Jonathan Kersting with the Pittsburgh tech Council and tech vibe radio, Tom, so glad to have you here today. I cannot wait to start nerding out because you always bring fun stuff. Yeah, man. I love robots. Yeah.

All right. Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan. I'm I'm always happy to talk to you and happy to talk about the things we've been doing. technologies.

So, yeah, where to begin, give us like a nickel tour of birdbrain he kind of just the overview what you guys do and how you do it. I love the fact that you have these direct CMU ties, of course, which just makes it so cool. So tell us about nerd brain. We're going to jump into all the fun stuff you're working on this summer.

Yeah, so so birdbrain is 10 years old this year? Actually, it was our 10th 10th birthday in June. We're spinoff of Carnegie Mellon and our mission is to inspire deepened joyful learning for all students through creative robotics. So we have two products that were developed at Carnegie Mellon, the Finch robot and the hummingbird robotics kit. And the Finch robot is a robot that's all about learning Computer Science from you know whether you're a kindergartener or a college student. It's meant to be kind of an engaging introduction to the art of programming coding. The Hummingbird kit is an electronics kit. So it's like a box of parts, you know, motors and you use it to build robots with arts and crafts materials so students will use these typically third fourth grade up through high school to build like crazy animatronic things robotic dragons animatronic dioramas, interpretations of poetry, interpretations of poetry are rockin...

So, um, so yeah, so we've we've been around for 10 years, we see ourselves as primarily focusing on creating learning experiences and doing that in schools or other settings where you have a teacher and a group of students. Gotcha. And so, you know, part of our mission I said this for all students and we felt like as a company, working through schools is the most equitable way that we are going to reach the most number of students. Definitely, um, so you know, in March, the pandemic hits and obviously creates lots of pressures. for schools operating, everybody has to go remote all of a sudden kind of immediately and suddenly. And so in the spring, you know, I, I see, typically I see lots of students creating Hummingbird projects, especially, you know, building robots, especially in like May May, in June end of April after standardized tests are over. That seems to be when when the robots come out in school, the real learning begins. Yeah. Right. You actually get some creativity at the end of the school year.

So, so I knew that wasn't going to necessarily happen this year, and or at least happened in the same way. And so we started trying to develop different ways that we could support students to continue learning at home teachers to teach remotely and so we've come up with a number of different things. We worked with a couple of after school, and some Camp providers to create virtual robotics workshops where we ship the kits directly to students homes and then they also get an instructor over zoom to help them create projects. So that worked really well in spring and summer and it's continuing into fall. I mean, if you think about it, like the daycare and after school challenges are over, like even, you know, your school's remote and they're maybe doing a better job of like engaging your students per school day than they did in the spring but you still have after school you still have to deal with what what to do from three to five or three to six. Um, so so that's one piece that we worked on and that we got rolling within a month like April 15. I think I love it

just that fast or like we're not we're getting it out there and you do that a lot.

Another thing that was like interesting thought, you know, my backgrounds as an engineer...So my background is as an engineer, and so I am always focused on technology in a way, it's kind of like you kind of have to unlearn that to some extent. Good.  Yeah, you got to sort of geek out about something. So one thing, one thing I figured out pretty early on also was how to make robots programmable remotely. And so that means that you know, I have a robot here. You can program it over there. You can program it anywhere on the internet, you could be in Australia and program this robot.

That's what I'm talking about. I love it. I love it. How much fun were the kids having through zoom being able to get a robotics lesson in a programming lesson and and see what they're learning actually go into the action on that robot moving around and doing tasks in front of them?

Yeah, yeah. It's just it's, it was so cool when we first rolled it out. I mean, it's still really cool. Like people. Don't expect it. I don't think that that's possible almost. And, I mean, we had within a month, again, like I had set up five robots in my house and I had sent, I created this webpage where anyone could go at any time and program them and they're still set up and running and, you know, accepting, like, thunderstorms. Like last week, they run pretty much 24 seven.

So, yeah, sometimes the power goes out I need the robot factories down right now. Right.

But yeah, like you can see them online and you can go to the site and program them and move them around and, and learn a little bit about coding while you're doing that. And I definitely heard from teachers who in the spring, were sending their students to that site and saying, hey, go, you know, instead of programming the robots that we don't have, at your house, go program these robots.

That's super cool. I love it, man. I know also you had you early in the in the pandemic, you're providing a discount and stuff like that on certain kits to people could actually do some stuff at home you're shipping some kits out, I believe, right?

Yeah, I mean I think we're what we figured out is that the like the virtual camps work better, okay does roll in the instruction with the with the kit. And I think that that works really well now. So you and tell us about these these these virtual camps. I think this is so important because as you said, you still need to keep kids busy, and keep them learning but they'll know they're learning. They're having fun building robots and doing cool stuff. So what's up with the virtual games?

So what we figured out was we we found two providers, both of them are actually in New York City. And they've been running in person Hummingbird camps for quite a while. And so they they saw an opportunity here they knew both Okay, well, like our audience is going online. And we need to figure out how to keep these camps going. But also, like, we could now broaden things, right? We don't have to just enroll people in New York City anymore, we can enroll anyone anywhere in the country. And so the idea is just, you know, they tell us, we've got these students signed up, you know, send them all Hummingbird kits. And then they work with, with the students in typically have like an hour long zoom session twice a week, like for for six weeks and give them that direct instruction that helps the student kind of get started. And then, you know, there's also kind of asynchronous time where they're building the robots and doing things on their own. Right. And it's just, it's, it's awesome to see and it's it's a model that we are recommending or encouraging teachers in schools to look at also for this coming school year. So it's sort of a one to one robotics model where you You know, where the students get the robots and get to take them home for a few days or weeks, and the teacher can provide some instruction over zoom. But the students can, can build the robots we actually saw a few schools do this also often, like, often the teacher just sort of let the kids take the robots home without asking permission. Like in the spring, and now we're making case studies out of those experiences, and it worked, you know, like, I could see like administrators potentially worried about like, well, what if, what if things break or what if, you know, what if there are issues in the home environment and what we're finding both from these virtual camps but also from these examples of, of teachers, allowing the students to take them home is that's not really a concern like thing that students are able to build robots at home and since the hummingbird kit in particular is all about building with arts and crafts supplies, all you need is a recycling plumbed in.

Exactly. And supply macaroni, right? Yeah. pipe cleaners, but construction paper. Okay.

Great stuff. Now, before we were starting the interview here, you had mentioned that just just as crew was hitting us, you're getting ready to release the second version of fish. Yeah. And some Tell us about that. But you're still going to release it anyhow, which I think is awesome. Because I mean, that defense has been your bread and butter, I think a big part of what you guys do, right?

Yeah. So I mean, the Finch is all about, you know, about learning computer science and coding. And about two years ago, we started the design process for the next generation of events. So the original things came out of Carnegie Mellon was launched as a commercial product in 2011. And we're still selling them. But we realized, you know, two years ago, like, hey, there's a lot of new technology out there, we could upgrade the hardware, we could really do some interesting things. And so we we got around to designing it and we were initially planning to launch early right around when the pandemic hit. So here's the Finch 2.0 You're looking good.

Yeah, it's, it's, I'm really excited about getting this out.

The pandemic did slow us down, you know, there were production delays, supply chain issues, all sorts of issues really. But we are in the final stages of production now. And so expect to ship them in October November.

See just in time for the holiday season. Right.

So tell us about like, like, like, what else will fit we'll finish to do that since one cannot do.

So it's got lots of LEDs...so you know the beacon light up. There's four LEDs in the tail here that can change different colors. There's like a an array of LEDs. Yeah. And you can use there's a way to mount a pen in this whole, okay, and you can do accurate movement so you can program it to draw shapes triangles are cool. It has light sensors, it has line sensors so it can track a line. It has an accelerometer, so you could pick it up and turn it into like a musical instrument. There's just a ton of things that you can do with this. And now with with remote robots, you can even program them before we start shipping them. So I'm doing webinars like once every couple of weeks now that are called Open playgrounds. Yeah, ain't just your you know, you come in, I send you a link to program the robot. And then we spend an hour in the studio that the bird brain technology studio and you can watch the finches. I have six finches set up there. Okay, um, you can watch them from the top down. You can watch them from the side and I even have, so there's some Lego blocks here. I built a little Lego smartphone holder Cool. Got a point of view camera from my smartphone also on one of the finches so that's I want to get a Finch to and play with it. Come on. And this is fun. That is awesome stuff all the way around. It seems like obviously man you're able to keep things up and going. Despite the pandemic in October, you got the Finch two coming out, which is pretty exciting that these camps going on to keep the kids busy. Because we don't know what's happening with school and even when it is in and out kids still need to go to these camps is a safe way for kids to learn and just have a ton of fun. I wish I could go back. Oh my goodness, 40 years and geeked out on this stuff as an eight year old because that to me would be so much fun. And what you're doing Tom This is what's making Pittsburgh just such a cool city man all the way around is folks like you that you know, you take some technology you license it out and get it into the marketplace and get this great Carnegie Mellon, connections. Everything about I think it's just awesome. I just love it.

Thank you. Jonathan, thanks.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's all about like, like I said, creating, creating joyful learning experiences, right. Like, it's all about getting the kids engaged in this stuff. That's the most powerful kind. I mean, somebody's kids. I mean, obviously, they're, I think about all like that I go back 40 years when I was in school, man, we didn't any, nothing was fun. You're just memorizing Stuff and Being told you got to learn things. But now it's like, there's technologies like yours, where you're just having fun, and you're building and you're creating, and you don't even know that you're learning. And that to me is awesome. Yeah, very cool. So thanks for hanging out with me today, Tom and berberine. What a cool company. And I encourage everyone, go to the website and check you guys out websites in the liner notes of this. Tell him you're the best man. Thanks for hanging out with me in Comcast in one of our 50 summer stories of Pittsburgh tech, that's for sure. Right.

Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai