Using the lure of secret communications and the time-tested appeal of the friendship bracelet, the creators of Jewelbots are introducing a new way to teach girls to write computer code.
It’s a bracelet with a flower that both lights up and vibrates, allowing its wearers — the target audience is girls ages 9 to 14 — to send secret messages to one another by programming them from an app on a smart phone.
“When I want to tell my best friend that a boy she likes is outside, I can send her a message,” said Jewelbots CEO Sara Chipps, who founded the New York-based company with COO Brooke Moreland.
Even without programming them, the bracelets notify girls when they are close to their friends by creating similar patterns in the flowers to match their friends’ bracelets.
And the best part: Those girls don’t even realize they are learning a valuable tool that can pave the way for a career in computer science and technology.
"After girls get more advanced, they can program the bracelet,” Chipps said. “They can plug them into their computer and program them to do pretty much anything they imagine. It can tell them when it’s about to rain or when their parents are coming to pick them up or if they have a new Instagram follower.”
Sounds like a middle school teacher’s nightmare, right? Not so fast, Chipps said.
“We’ve talked to a lot of teachers,” Chipps said. “Ninety percent of schools don’t have STEM curriculum. The schools that do cost $40,000 plus per year. [Teachers] don’t have time to put it together, and they don’t have a budget. They have no way of teaching these kids. So the teachers that we’ve spoken to are just excited that they’ll have this in their lives.”
So they’ve got teachers in their corner. They’ve also got a lot of competition. The world of STEM-centered toys for girls is getting increasingly crowded — think GoldieBlox and Roominate, for instance. But Chipps said Jewelbots occupies a distinct niche: Its target audience is older, for one. It’s also focused on computer science rather than engineering.
And then there’s the fact that Jewelbots is manufacturing a wearable, at a very good time to be in wearables.
Chipps started coding as a 12-year-old, as a way to make friends. She and her two younger brothers were home-schooled, and she was looking for a way to socialize with other kids when she figured out a way to connect using a BBS, or bulletin board system. She could use a BBS server to dial-in to other people’s computers and join chats or play games with as many as 10 people at a time. BBS’s were a precursor to the World Wide Web.
“I ended up helping to run the BBS by the time I was 13,” Chipps said. “I fell in love with computing then.”
She’s hoping Jewelbots will do the same for girls, who statistically seem to be showing less interest in the sciences at about the time they reach their pre-teens. The number that Chipps keeps coming back to is less than 20 percent of technical workers in the U.S. are women. As a software engineer for the past 15 years, she usually finds herself the only woman in the room.
“I think that’s why it’s been a passion for me,” Chipps said. “Because it’s never comfortable to be the only one like you in a room. No matter who you are. It takes a lot of confidence to be able to participate in those situations. So I just think it would be great for that not to be the case in the future.”
If the company's response on Kickstarter is any indication, Jewelbots will be a hit. Chipps and Moreland set out with a goal of raising $30,000. When they closed donations on Aug. 4, they had raised $166,945 from 1,820 backers.
Chipps said Jewelbots is able to differentiate itself because its products are aimed at older girls, and the focus is on computer science — not engineering.
“I think that both Roominate and GoldieBlox are amazing,” Chipps said. “In fact, I bought GoldieBlox for my niece, who is 7, and she loves them … (Those toys) are aimed at a younger audience, and it’s a great way to get them in the door. But we wanted to make sure the girls are learning to write real code, code that an adult would write.”
Toy expert Alita Friedman, who is CEO of a consulting firm called Alita’s Brand Bar and former chief brand officer for Ugly Doll stuffed toys, said a critical benefit of the Jewelbots product is that it is wearable technology, like the Apple Watch.
“Now you’re taking fun and the cuteness of the wearables and bringing in a component where now girls would want to wear things like that and interact with the other thing they’re carrying around all day, their cell phone or iPad,” Friedman said. “It will also allow them to be creative while they’re wearing a bracelet and having fun with their friends.”
So Jewelbots stands a good chance of nabbing the audience, but what about funding?
“There’s venture money out there, and there’s money for startups where people are interested in funding these projects,” Friedman said. “Then the toy retailers are definitely interested in bringing these products into their marketplace.”
source:bizwomen
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