Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, co-founders of Two-Bit Circus, have debuted their first STEAM Carnival in the Port of Los Angeles over the weekend, following
a successful Kickstarter campaign early last year.
Two-Bit Circus is a Los Angeles-based experimental entertainment company, through which Bushnell and Gradman founded STEAM Carnival, as well as through its Steam Powered non-profit arm.
Based off the acronym STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - STEAM also includes Art. As John Maeda of RISD and MIT explains, "Our culture isn't doing enough to get kids interested in STEAM. As professional inventors, we rely on these disciplines every day, and want to share our excitements about them with kids young and old. Through years of building and demonstrating fun games we've learned no better way to get kids into STEAM than to show them an amazing time. When you say 'engineering' to most kids they zone out. But when you say 'lasers, robots, and fire,' you have their undivided attention."
STEAM Carnical is the "carnival re-imagined," a combination of fun, social and interactive play experiences and games that engage the mind, and will hopefully spark interest among young people in these areas. The idea is to take all the cool knowledge that is incorporated in the attractions and take kids from that "wow" moment of how awesome they are to the "aha" notion that they can build these things themselves.
As we reported when the carnival was still seeking crowd-finding (which they successfully received with $102,699), the first stops would be L.A. and San Francisco. Visit
www.steamcarnival.com for more info and to buy tickets.
