Revolutionizing STEAM Learning w/ Kai's Education Founder Bruce Jackson

In this episode, we're diving into the world of educational innovation as we host Bruce Jackson, the visionary Founder and CEO of Kai's Education. Discover how Kai's Education is revolutionizing STEAM learning through cutting-edge robotics and mixed reality coding. Bruce shares his journey from a personal hobby to developing tools that empower teachers and engage students in new, exciting ways. Don't miss Bruce's insights into creating inclusive educational experiences for all students, including those with special needs.

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Episode Highlights:

• Why Education Innovation is Important in STEAM
• Supply Chain and Procurement Issues
• Will Robotics Become an Education Staple?
•  AI Large Language Models
• State of New Zealand's Tech Sector 

Links and Resources:

• Learn More about Bruce here
• Learn More about Kai's Education here

Transcript: 

James: Hey everyone, this is James from the Control + Listen podcast. I am joined by my new guest host today, Joseph Passmore. Great to have you on the show with us, Joseph. Thanks for joining.

Joseph: Thank you.

James: And joining us as a guest is Bruce, the CEO and founder of Kai's Education. A really cool company based outta New Zealand that's working in the robotics space. They're actually operating in the education space in that sense. Thank you for coming on the show, really great to have you on.

Bruce:Yeah, thanks for having me, James and Joseph. Much appreciated.

James: Anytime. Just to start off, do you maybe wanna tell people a little bit about the company, your mission and what exactly it is you're doing?

Bruce: Yeah, so I mean, at Kai's Education we develop kind of mixed reality coding, robotics for the education space. You know, I started this out as a bit of a hobby, as you can see in the background I started in 3D printing and that led me on to developing resources for the classroom because we were fine, we were putting 3D printers out there, but they weren't really being used in the classroom. So I started developing curriculum based content, you know, to support 3D printers. At the same time, my son was going to school and he was, you know, starting to learn to code, and I was like really excited. I was proud parent. He's following in his dad's footsteps and then, you know, he came back and he showed me what we're doing, but they were just rolling balls around on the ground and I'm like, how is this coding? You know, this is not coding, this is, you know, you can do this at home. So yeah, so I talked to the teacher and talked to another teacher and found out that what they were doing in the classroom was basically just using, you know, consumer-based toys converted to educational resources to try and teach kids coding. So that got me onto the development of, you know, developing products. And also part of my background, I'm a ADHD and I'm also blind in one eye. So in the classroom I was really excluded from a lot of activities and I was just put in the naughty corner. And that, you know, all of these kind of elements have been part of the story that builds up to having tools for teachers in the classroom to help them be able to teach coding for all students, not just mainstream.

James: I love that. And I was also same sort of story as you, ADD, back of the class, so I know exactly what that experience is like, and I would've loved something like this to engage me.

Bruce: Yeah.

James: So that's the mission, obviously, but do you wanna explain a little bit about why that's so important to the future of education?

Bruce: Yeah, I mean, what I see in the classroom, whether it's in Italy or Australia or New Zealand or in the US, I see that a lack of tools being used to teach industry 4.0 because, you know, we've got AI, we've got IRD, we've got all these, you know, acronyms, but how can we put these together and teach these principles to kids because oh my god, you know, today's world with AI we've had a cart and wheel kind of explosion with AI and it's just gonna continue and we've gotta prepare our students for tomorrow. And how do we do that? How does a teacher do that with the limited resources they do have? How do they do that? And that's a big problem. So we've kind of got a twofold challenge for us is, one, providing the right tools for the classroom, and two, making sure that our end users, our students are engaged and learning a kind of like a cross curricular subject matter in both IOT or whatever of these trending subjects there are.

James: Obviously you operate in a specific type of classroom. What exactly is a STEAM class?

Bruce: Well, STEAM is basically kind of all, a whole lot of subjects put into one kind of bucket. So you got science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, and the arts has been added in later.

James:Okay.

Joseph: Could you describe the Kai Bot for the listeners and tell us a little bit more about the manufacturing and design process?

Bruce: Well, yeah, so KaiBot is a, I've got one here, little unicorn KaiBot with a little cardboard sleeve on it. So it's got a small thing, it's got a little screen on the front, and yeah, KaiBot is our second robot and Kai's Clan, this one here is our first robot. And our specialty at Kai's Education is pairing or blending the physical world with the virtual world because, you know, during Covid we had students just going digital, digital, digital. And there's no tactile learning. But what we want to do is we want to make it both tactile and digital. That doesn't mean that it's a simulation in the virtual world and then they play around with the physical, both of our products are focused purely on mirroring both the physical and the virtual because this yellow robot has no relevance in the real world, right? It's got some relevance in terms of doing some kind of robotics, but how do we make it relevant? Well, it could be a Mars rover and then they're coding a Mars rover, and then they can sit inside a virtual reality headset and code the physical rover while experiencing that in virtual reality, whether they're in an Amazon warehouse or on Mars.

Joseph: And when you are manufacturing the robots, how do you manage supply chain issues and issues with procurement?

Bruce: Oh, that is, you know, that is a challenge. You know, hardware has been hard and hardware is always difficult, but yeah, how do we manage that? Well, we have software to help control and manage the sub assemblies and the assemblies, so you know, with a simple product like this, the components on a circuit board and all the sub assemblies have to be managed and the stock holding of all those have to be managed. And we've got a bulk buy ahead in case we have these component shortages. So that is a challenge. But we do manufacture in China, but we do all the kind of management in New Zealand here. And then we're, you know, then we are sending those products out to multiple warehouses and managing inventory and managing demand, because when we released our KaiBot in January this year, we sold out within three weeks. So you know, that becomes its own supply chain nightmare where you go, okay, well we sold out because it's a new product launch. How many do you order? How many components do you order for the whole, say maybe a whole two year period. Toyota is an amazing company where they didn't run out of components during Covid. So trying to follow those kind of philosophies, which cost a lot of money 'cause you've gotta bankroll all those components up ahead, up front.

James: Do you see robotics becoming sort of a staple in the education space in the near future? Or I mean, robotics and coding, I should say?

Bruce: Well, I don't like to, I mean, yes, robotics has always, robotics has been in the education space for a long time. We do things very different to any of our competitors. Our competitors give a student a robot and they kind of are coding it in a silo. Whereas we are the only education company that allows students to code over the internet physical robots. We are the only company that does VR, physical control or physical robots over VR over the internet, you know, so we do a lot of unique things and it's not a technical feature that I'm trying to put across here. It's a way of collaboration in a classroom because just like in a company, you know, you've got your sales people, you've got your accounting people, they're all working together for a common good of that company. And you know, at Kai's Education, we are trying to deliver a product that is for the common good of all students. You know, whether it's the designer that stands out or the ADHD kid in the corner, we are trying to find, you know, there's a space for every kid. So maybe that kid doesn't like doing robotics and he likes designing in Minecraft. Okay, well, he can design some elements in Minecraft that can be used as a robot avatar and sit on top of the physical robot in the virtual space. So we like to have it as a collaborative system so everyone's got equal opportunities to shine in the classroom.

Joseph: In terms of education, how do you envision coding being integrated further into education in the future?
- Well, you know, in some countries you've got coding as a standard language. Shouldn't we all be able to at least in some basic form know how to talk to a computer. I think that's really important, even if there's AI and we can use some generative text, but I think having that understanding of how math works, our common English works and how coding works, I think it's really important that we are able to understand and understand how a computer works. Even if a kid just does some basic, you know, one year of it and goes off to university, they've got some basic knowledge on that, and I think that's important.

Joseph: So does that mean that you wouldn't be looking at integrating large language models or natural language coding into the robots in the future? Because the point is in fact to teach this, this actual coding language

Bruce: No, no, are you talking about large language models for AI?

Joseph: Yeah,

Bruce: Yeah. Oh no, definitely. We are already starting to do some features integrated into our systems for that. But with education you got a really big challenge when you're developing a product and that is how do you make something, you've got an aging population, sorry, let me back up the truck here. So you've got a aging population of teachers and they're not, you know, I'm also aging as well, but you know, we haven't been brought up in all the technology we've got, so you've got kids 10 years old, 12 years old using AI today, but you've got teachers that have never used AI maybe. And what we've got now with these chatbots, it's made it easy for a teacher to understand and grasp it. But in terms of learning a language model for a teacher, that's maybe, you know, 40 to 60 or 40 to 50 years old, that's quite a difficult thing to grasp. So making something complex easy to use is actually a very complex task. You know, we built in IOT, AT/VR all into one collaborative product, and that is insanely a difficult task, and it's difficult to make it easy for the teacher. Kids will grab it, but if we can't make it easy enough for the teacher to use, then we can't sell any products. So you've got a very big challenge on introducing something like that, but at the same time making it easy because we do target, oh, sorry, just for clarification, we do target, you know, so kindergarten up to intermediate schools. So we're not really targeting much of the high school or college.

James: Understandable. I actually did wanna ask something that leads on from what you just said, which is what's the adoption rate sort of been like in schools and what's the feedback been from teachers that have been using it?

Bruce:You know, when we did our first product, Kai's Clan, which is a AR/VR robotics, that's been a challenge for us because we realized that it's difficult to get through that teacher you know, that teacher was our roadblock because we made a product that was really good, that the kids were gonna learn a lot, but we had a big roadblock and we failed, we failed on our initial launch, you know? So we had to take all the product back and say, you know, how do we do this? We've got mesh networking inside technical, you know, mesh networking on how the robots talk to each other and how do we get onto a school network? School networks is another challenge. But we took that back, we redid it and we relaunched the product and now, you know, we've got really good traction, especially in the US. And then with our new product, KaiBot, you know, that's a screen free robot, so unplugged and you teach coding using physical coding cards, and we are the first company to also unlock learning to code for blind students, completely blind students. And that is a special thing to experience. When we were testing in the US I had these two students come over to me at our booth and I wasn't paying much attention, and one student said to me, oh, you know, can I have a play with us? I'm like, yeah, sure. You know, and he goes and he uses KaiBot and he's tapping on the cards and I look up, you know, the other student was just standing there and not interacting. Then I realized, you know, a bit of a dumb moment there, but I realized he was totally blind. And then I thought, oh my God, I'm just seeing myself back in the classroom again and seeing how you know, I was being excluded from things and this blind student couldn't, excuse me, I've got, you know, things this moment really it takes me back, but it's like I was excluded. I had designed a product that completely excluded him. So I came back to our team and said, hey, we've gotta stop what you're doing and we've gotta make our product fully inclusive, so we've gotta make it so we have brail cards, we've got screen readers, and we can take a five-year-old blind student and teach 'em how to code. And you see the light bulbs go on when these blind kids or any kid, deaf or blind or any special needs is given the opportunity to do these things. And wow, it's really special.

James: It's fantastic. We've had some guests on that are working in the disability space with blind people specifically, and honestly, AI and other technology that's advancing in this space is making it so much easier for them to actually function in society and I love seeing it.

Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, the AI stuff is gonna be just absolutely next level, you know, once we have some kind of camera AI reading glasses for blind people so they can describe what they see.

James: We actually had a guest on whose company does exactly that.

Bruce: Oh wow.

James:The glasses that actually describe rooms and settings, reads to you, all sorts of things. And you can either use the AI setting or you can phone a guest or a friend who can describe it to you, see through the camera in your glasses.

Bruce:Oh, right, yeah,

James: Which is really cool.

Bruce: That's amazing. Yeah. I mean that's the thing with all this stuff is as software is gonna be absolutely worthless in the future, generally software or services will be, because as AI becomes better and better, software's gonna become easier to make. And you know, software's gonna have no value. Information will have value, information that's behind locked doors or locked you know, behind doors will have value where AI cannot access that. So maybe medical information and things like that.

James: Yeah, it's a new frontier.

Bruce: It is indeed.

James: Joseph, I know you had some stuff you wanted to ask as well.

Joseph:Yeah, I had a more sort of general question about the state of New Zealand's tech sector at the moment and whether there's been a sort of bounce back after Covid or what you've seen.

Bruce: Yeah, I mean, you know, we are a member of the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, so we are lucky enough to be one of 700 companies in the whole of New Zealand that are what they call focus customers. And you know, you keep on running into companies that go, oh you guys are just in New Zealand, but I've seen you in the US you know, doing big things. So it's quite amazing to see how many New Zealand companies, you know, like zero accounting, you know, there's quite a lot of New Zealand companies that are very high on the innovation space doing great things, whether it's rockets or medical or all sorts of things. So yes, to answer your question, yes, we've definitely bounced back and the government is definitely supports and helps companies get ready for, you know, for getting access to the rest of the world.

Joseph: Great. And how can listeners, whether they're in education or they're just individuals who are interested in what you're working on, how can they get involved and support?

Bruce: Yeah, we've got an ambassador program on our website, kaiseducation.com. Just pop us an email, you know, we are humans and we answer emails and you know, I love talking to teachers and finding out what challenges they've got because those challenges have helped us. You know, our products are only as good as the teacher's feedback we get. So yeah.

Joseph: Great.

James: And if people want to, you know, support your company as in find what you're doing, stay in touch, follow socials, what are the best places to do all of those things?

Bruce: Kai's Education, K-A-I-S education.com or Kai's Education on Twitter, X, same for Facebook and all the other socials and LinkedIn and that.

James: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. It's been absolutely fascinating learning about your company and your mission.

Bruce: No, I really appreciate the opportunity and thanks so much.

Joseph: Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it.

James: For anyone else listening, stay tuned. Next week we'll have another guest for you and make sure to follow and support Kai's Education. Thanks.