Isaac Bickmore
Isaac Bickmore, a Doctor of Music Education student in the School of Music, is the recipient of $10,000 in services in the Speed::Seed event, sponsored by ATOM design, an innovation and product development company. Bickmores project, "Bot + BotScripts" was selected as the grand prize winner after a competitive selection process.
Bickmore's project involves starting a business that makes and sells programmable robots for kids and provides curriculum and educational support for assisting teachers and other adults. He applied to the competition to extend the reach of a $10,000 Edson Grant that he received last spring.
"We are using our grant and award money to build a prototype of our robot," says Bickmore. "We want to make a product that teachers, students, school administrators, and parents want to buy and like to use. We are also using the money to develop our website and educational support infrastructure... I have always been interested in interdisciplinary learning, and that you could be doing music in your English class or art in your math class. Our goals as a company are to develop tools that encourage interdisciplinary project based learning, and demonstrate that computational thinking can happen outside of science, technology, engineering and math. It can happen in the arts as well."