2013 (Kickstarter in Nov.)

After graduating, I recruited my friend Cappie Pomeroy. Together we founded an educational company, NarwhalEdu, to highlight the creative side of engineering. Our class, “Introduction to Engineering,” was accompanied by a drawing robot arm of our own design, and raised over twenty thousand dollars on Kickstarter while reaching over ninety students around the world.
We taught it on EdX with the permission of MIT’s Director of Digital Learning, Prof. Sanjay Sarma. We shipped ninety robotics kits on time and on-budget. Hanna Lin helped with the mechanical design and more over Summer 2013.
We were accepted into the 2013 MIT Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator. By focusing on hands-on online learning, we sought to address flaws we saw in our own education, such as the tendency to rely on funding, teacher resources, and large teams not available in rural settings, as well as the focus on competitions that skewed heavily male.
Press:
- Wicked Cool Education from NarwhalEdu, Makezine, Dec. 2013
- Learn Engineering and Draw Narwhals, Hackaday, Nov. 2013
Our backers around the world
Demos
Drawing a narwhal
Copying the motions of a mock arm
More media
We produced a class on the experimental EdX, EdXedge.



Related Links
- Robots, Drawing, and Engineering: An Online Course by NarwhalEdu – Kickstarter
- NarwhalEdu CopyCat Robot – Drawing a narwhal from nouyang on Vimeo
- NarwhalEdu CopyCat Drawing Robot – Direct human to robot control from nouyang on Vimeo.