kp221109 Into STWEAM

Getting into the STWEAM of Things

Discovering there is a “seal of approval” for STEAM-based toys and games, the maker of Kids with Presses is reminded of a company CEO he met recently whose APP helps kids write stories. She may modify STREAM to read STWEAM and extend her offering and his. 488 Words

Gimme the seal

From Give me the Brain game – a horrid little video game invented in the Pacific Northwest – I think of “Give me the Seal.” For our printmaking games and toys company, I want the TOT Association – The Other Thing. It may be called STWEAM.

Inured as many entrepreneurs are to seals, buttons, badges and such like rewards and approval, a seal like this on the box of the Printmaking Teachers in a Box would be helpful in marketing and selling PTIAB.

Recently I met a woman who provides a writing APP to her subscribers. Her point is that what has been STREAM – Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math – should emphasize the importance of Writing. Thus it should be STWEAM.

Besides, STREAM is taken. It refers to how people get tied to the screens by STREAMing video movies, sports, news, etc. STREAMing is pushing cable aside as the preferred means of using media.

Reading is a consumer activity, and tethers people to screens; her goal is to slacken that tether by putting young peoples’ hands to the task of writing – a producer activity. Only by production can kids help save their world, the world into which they are bound to grow.

As I am thinking it is good strategic planning to put the cart before the horse and visualize the end goal in mind, then I suggest we must see this seal STWEAM on our products and services’ packaging as part of our brand. It does not exist as yet, but I can – in under an hour – create one suitable for screens and, given a couple more hours – a real brass badge.

Add some more time I can make copper and brass printing plates for printmaking as I am a PTIAB. Papermaking, too, is in the deal.

I digress.

Better yet, we invent our own STWEAM Toy Association, aiming for the niche market of which PTIAB is part. Where the existing, conventional association – with all its top-heavy administration and government institutions tethers – we live in a new space of children who are under twelve years old.

They own the future, and that is where they cannot afford fools. A glance a morning TV news show where the top winners of the seal shows the foolishness of the Toy Association – toys designed by grownups with all their old-world ties to wasteful, conspicuous consumption.

In a world that is ending under the old centralized practices overload of backward-facing frames of reference, I feel it is incumbent, under my DIY future Declaration of Interdependence (designed and signed in 2004) to do this myself.