Supporting STEM and Robotics Programs

Elizabeth with Will and Jaden SmithOur family has been involved in robotics competitions for several years now, with Elizabeth competing while Ann and Jon help coach and mentor. Elizabeth just finished her second season competing in FIRST Tech Challenge with her team, Brick Buddies, winning the Florida state championship. Just a few weeks later, her team was back together working on a project for the XPRIZE After Earth Challenge, a summer competition for students. They were asked to be an ambassador team and encourage students to participate.

Elizabeth Red CarpetAs part of that, we travelled to Miami for an event at the Miami Science Museum with Will and Jaden Smith to promote the challenge as well as their new After Earth movie. It was quite an experience for the kids – walking the red carpet, talking to media, and getting on stage with Will and Jaden to talk about robotics and the XPRIZE After Earth Challenge.

If you can pull together a team of 1-4 students ages 13-17 plus an adult team captain, check out the challenge and give it a shot. The first phase of the challenge is to create a two-minute video. Brick Buddies posted a list of tips on creating the video. You can learn a lot and you never know where it might take you.

We owe a big thank you to all of our Thinkamingo customers and supporters for giving us the opportunity to take time to participate in things like this.

Camp NaNoWriMo Tools for Nook

Nook Lists for WritersWith Camp NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starting soon, I wanted to point out that several of our popular creative writing apps are available on the Barnes and Noble Nook Color. The iPad versions have been featured on numerous sites, including Cult of Mac, NPR All Tech Considered, and MakeUseOf.

  • Our Lists for Writers app has dozens of lists to help quickly develop characters, settings and plots.
  • Our Story Dice app uses combinations of pictograms to help brainstorming of plots.
  • Our Name Dice app gives instant inspiration in the form of random character names. It’s really surprising how much the right name can shape the character’s personality in the writer’s mind.

Sometimes, using an app to throw some random ideas into your writing can really help spark your creativity! Good luck with Camp NaNoWriMo this year!

Sports Card Pro series updates

Our Sports Card Pro series of apps have been updated.

We’ve added some additional color variations of the current card template design. We’re looking forward to releasing additional template designs in the near future.

The app now fully supports retina 4″ devices (iPhone 5 and iPod touch 5th generation).

There have been a number of bug fixes and performance improvements.

Story Dice featured on National Public Radio

NPR LogoOur Story Dice app was featured on NPR Morning Edition. It was a segment with Mark Frauenfelder and his 9 year old daughter Jane. They have a podcast, Apps for Kids, that reviews apps. Most exciting for us, in addition to co-founding Boing Boing and being an editor at Wired, Mark is the editor-in-chief of Make Magazine. We’ve been fans of Make for a long time and were proud to hang out and help at the Tampa Bay Mini-Maker Faire last year. Jon even has a Make button on his laptop bag.