Canidu at Maker Faire San Francisco 2012

Wow! We’ve been working real hard in the lead up to this year’s San Francisco Maker Faire. We changed our design significantly since our last update, as you can see, and we’re proud to bring the latest to show here.

We had a really great day at Maker Faire day 1 — thanks to everyone who came by!

Here are some photos of people having fun and checking out how circuits work:

 

Shenzhen Maker Faire

Hey there! If you happen to be in south China, you might have recently seen us at the Shenzhen Maker Faire. If not, we hope to see you at the San Francisco Maker Faire coming up May 19-20; until then, here are some photos from last weekend:

Reference Texts at Canidu HQ

We just relocated to Shenzhen to be closer to manufacturing, and so the team can all work closely together from the same location.  As we set up our new workspace, these three books all ended up next to each other on our coffee table:

Canidu Goes on the Map

Jason Li, our talented and delightful designer, drew up our new logo on this world map at the Canidu headquarters:

A great beginning! The red C in our logo is inspired by the electronics schematic symbol for a transistor — which makes perfect sense after you’ve played with Yes: Circuits

impressive free-handing by Jason.

Hendrick likes the finished version.

Nice work Jason!

Canidu visits Shanghai LEGO Learning Center

This Wednesday, two of us from Canidu had the honor of visiting one of Shanghai’s LEGO Learning Centers (http://semia.com).  We were delighted to find quotes by Seymour Papert and Jean Piaget on the walls — two greats who pioneered revolutions in what we know about learning and cognitive stages:

Papert is particularly noteworthy for us — he cofounded the MIT Media Lab, developed the Turtle programming language for children called Logo, was one of the first to advocate giving computers to children — and is a direct intellectual  of our project.

Canidu came from a research project done in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

The LLK are the torch carrier’s of Papert’s work and today’s developers of Scratch, a block-based programming language for children.  Thanks to their sponsorship of this project’s early stages as research, we are here today, hoping to carry on the tradition of constructivist-based learning through developing models of the world and learning about electronics through play.