littleBits And NASA Bring Space Down To Earth With New ‘Space Kit’

[Buster's Uncle]

littleBits And NASA Bring Space Down To Earth With New ‘Space Kit’
TechCrunch
Posted 12 hours ago by Alexia Tsotsis






There is nothing more appealing to a nerd than space, as decades of television, the buzz around the Mars Rover landing and Elon Musk can attest to. This is probably why modular integrated circuits startup littleBits has partnered up with NASA to create the littleBits “Space Kit.” The kit will cost $189.

littleBits is hard to wrap your head around if you don’t actually have the product in hand. But once you do, the mix-and-match modules can be inspiring, teaching you — if you’re a normal — more about electrical engineering than anything else in your purview. Lesson one: You always need Power (blue) and Output (green) in order to create a minimum viable electronic circuit.

“If you think of a littleBits module as a brick – essentially a building block from which you can make anything – then you could say that Lego is the closest comparison of an infinitely extensible library,” says founder Ayah Bdeir, who recently spoke at TED. “Of course we’ve added another dimension entirely to our bricks by building the power of electronics into them.”



This is my basic speaker bit I built with the kit last night.


While she would not share revenue numbers, Bdeir told me that the “21st century brick” startup has sold “hundreds of thousands of units” in over 70 countries, in 2000 schools and has “trillions of billions of combinations” possible in its open source library.

littleBits, which formally launched its product in 2011, has raised $15.6 million from True Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Foundry Group, Joi Ito, Nicholas Negroponte, Joanne Wilson and more. Previous littleBits kits have been music and lighting oriented.

NASA approached littleBits in 2012, with the aim of educating more people about space travel. The collaboration’s specific purpose is to promote interest in STEM education, making robotics, energy and wireless data transmission easily accessible to people who didn’t get a degree in engineering.

Each Space Kit comes with 12 magnetic modules, including a numbers module, remote trigger and infrared LED sensor. The kit also comes with a booklet of circuit applications written by scientists at NASA, instructions on how to build your own wave generator, star chart, satellite orbit and model Mars Rover.

“We get A LOT of partnership requests but we picked NASA because space is critical, and massively important to every single person in the universe, and to society in general,” Bdeir writes, “But only so many of us understand what all these discoveries mean, and how they relate to us.”

The company plans to keep up the NASA relationship (you never know when that might come in handy!) and is organizing a series of hackathons and workshops around the kits, again hoping to get more people revved up about science and technology.

If someone had given one of these to me when I was seven, I probably would have become my dad.

INTRODUCING: littleBits Space Kit

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/littlebits-and-nasa-bring-space-down-to-earth-with-new-space-kit/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000591

[Unorthodox]

This is cool.  Looking up for the kids. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Check the vid.  It was posted wrong, now fixed.

[Unorthodox]

Oh I don't care about the space kit, specifically.  The basic set is neat...a little outside my price point. 

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA tries space kits to engage kids in science and space
Reuters
By Sarah McBride  13 hours ago



LittleBits chief executive and founder, Ayah Bdeir, poses at her company's headquarters in New York April 23, 2014. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid



NEW YORK (Reuters) - Making mini satellite dishes that collect signals or building remote-controlled mini Rovers such as the kind NASA has used on Mars are the types of activities that could interest kids in science, but their complexity can derail all but the most enthusiastic hobbyist.

Now, NASA, the U.S. space agency, hopes it has found a workaround through new space kits and a collaboration with a New York-based startup called LittleBits.

NASA, through its Aura mission to study the Earth’s ozone layer and climate, is working with LittleBits to develop activities around a new $189 space kit, announced on Thursday.

Using electronic modules such as motors and dimmers that snap together, the creations will perform functions that normally might require hours of tedious tinkering or piles of electronics components.

The new kits are more demanding than playing with snappable blocks like Legos, but far easier than wiring, soldering or programming.



LittleBits chief executive and founder, Ayah Bdeir, speaks on the phone at her company headquarters in New York April 23, 2014. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid


“You don’t have that frustration level,” said Steve Heck, a 5th and 6th grade math and science teacher at Mulberry Elementary in Ohio who says too many students lose interest in science and space experiments when the projects become too difficult.

“You’re going to get a much better student in the long run.”

For NASA, the partnership has a more specific goal.

“From our perspective, it was to engage kids in how NASA uses the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Ginger Butcher, education and public outreach lead for the Aura mission. “We can see how much ozone is in the atmosphere. We can see features on Mars.”

NASA reached out to LittleBits after Butcher saw its chief executive and founder, Ayah Bdeir, give a talk in 2012 about the company’s online modules and decided they could be helpful for Aura’s educational goals.



Electronic modules from a Little Bits kit are laid out during a product shoot at the Little Bits company headquarters in New York April 23, 2014. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid


LittleBits is building and selling the kit while NASA is developing the activities that go along with them. NASA will not benefit financially from the sale of the kits, Butcher said.

While the playthings are designed to stay earthbound, a few lucky kids could see their creations end up in space.

Working with a company called Xcor Aerospace, Heck said he hopes to get 10 student projects onto a suborbital flight in 2015. The students will be selected through a contest, and Heck said he believes many will submit LittleBits-based projects.

LittleBits says the kits will boost revenue as well as the company’s missions of incorporating better design into electronics and increasing familiarity with electronics among the public.

“Not understanding electronics is a form of illiteracy,” said CEO Bdeir. Her company is backed by venture-capital firms including the Foundry Group, Khosla Ventures and True Ventures.

It is unclear what demand may emerge for the kits - Bdeir said she expects to sell tens of thousands - or if they really will help children better understand the electromagnetic spectrum or outer space.

They go on sale at a time when space-related issues are increasingly coming into the public eye.

A few days ago, scientists announced they have found an earthlike planet known as Kepler-186f.

(Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)


http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-tries-space-kits-engage-kids-science-space-110020261--sector.html