Hi Pokitto Team,
With Kickstarter fullfillment and the new school year coming up, I am starting to think about obtaining additional Pokittos for teaching purposes. I’m sure you are focused on getting this batch out the door, but what are your current thoughts on a follow up production run? I’d certainly be interested in ordering more if I can prove out the Pokitto as a useful platform.
Hi Richard!
Glad to hear you thinking about classroom use. The target environment for Pokitto has been kids and classrooms from day 1. We know it is a demanding environment and we are aware of the level of ease-of-use that needs to be achieved. We’re working our way towards it.
We already had a preliminary contract with a big school here in Finland for a pilot of 100 units. Unfortunately that deal fell through due to an unsuccessful project application from their side. We also got quite a bit of interested feedback from teachers at Maker Faire Bay Area. We now have a much clearer idea how Pokitto can be used more effectively in classrooms.
As far as the production goes, we are only getting started. At the moment the bottleneck is suppliers, we are still waiting for some components. But when they arrive, we will have enough for 3x the Kickstarter units and will continue to manufacture and order more parts. This is probably the answer to your question. We have applied for Maker Faire Rome in December and the plan is to ramp up to a capacity of thousands of units a month by that time (my cautious estimate is we’re at 100-300 at the moment mostly due to the fact that this is 2 people doing this part-time … which is a situation that could change in the near future).
Jonne
That all sounds like good news to me. I can imagine Maker Faire attendees will be happy to be able to buy a Pokitto on the spot in the future. I really appreciate all the great information you share as you go through this adventure.
Another advantage of the Pokitto for me is that the Mbed online tools provide a programming environment and object download without needing to install software on the locked-down school computers. Even though Arduino has an online editor, I haven’t been able to get the helper application to install under that system.
We have gotten a lot of positive feedback about this from teachers. Apparently installing drivers on school computers is a bureaucratic nightmare.
Everyone thinks if you’re installing things on school computers it’s some hack to infiltrate their megahertz or defeating their cd roms or something