Joost Bonsen '90, SM '06 & Saul Griffith SM '01, PhD '04
Howtoons Signal the Birth of Open Kid Ware
Howtoons cofounders Joost Bonson '90, SM '06 (left) and Saul Griffith SM '01, PhD '04.
Give a kid a water rocket and she plays until the thing veers off course and lands with a thud on the neighbor's roof. Show a kid how to make a water rocket and she plays until her curiosity is satisfied. And if Howtoons cofounders Joost Bonsen '90, SM '06 and Saul Griffith SM '01, PhD '04 have anything to say about it, the fun will never stop.
Bonsen and Griffith are grad students at the MIT Media Lab and the creators of Howtoons, a cartoon that provides one-page, easy-to-follow, story-driven instructions on how to build science and engineering projects from readily available materials. Currently the toons are accessible only through the Howtoons Web site but that may change soon: Griffith and Bonsen hope Howtoons will one day be merely a legacy body of "Open Kid Ware," a broader collection of educational products for kids modeled after MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative.
Bonsen and Griffith hope to make Howtoons so intriguing that kids tear themselves away from television and computer screens in order to learn the old-fashioned way—through hands-on experimentation.
A graduate student at the Sloan School of Management with a degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT, Bonsen brings business savvy to the project. Griffith is pursuing his PhD in programmable cellular assembly at MIT's Media Lab. With a degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of New South Wales, a masters in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sydney, and a masters in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, Griffith knows a thing or two about how to use the materials around him in creative and purposeful ways. Last February he won the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT student prize for designing a virtual "desktop printer" for low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in developing nations who otherwise could not afford them.
Both Bonsen and Griffith were inspired as kids by the imaginative power of comics and cartoons. Bonsen, born in the Netherlands and raised in Silicon Valley, was weaned on the classic Adventures of Tintin as well as Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. He recalls a particular episode of Prince Valiant in which a young boy is inspired to learn trigonometry in order to solve his real-world problem of scaling a castle wall. "I realized right then," Bonsen explains, "that if you give a kid an inspiring reason to want to know something, he or she will pull out all stops."
Griffith grew up in Sydney, Australia. Like Bonsen, he, too, had an early interest in both comics and how-to craft books. "A few years ago, I came across this wonderful series of books called The Boy Mechanic and Handicrafts for Handy Boys. I thought, wouldn't it be great to reinterpret them in terms of the materials that are available to kids today?"
It turns out Bonsen was having similar ideas. After the pair met at an entrepreneurial seminar, Howtoons began to take shape. They employed professional DC Comics artist Nick Dragotta to bring the concept to life. Finished toons already demonstrate the marshmallow shooter, hover hockey, the ice board, the shockwave air cannon, and more. Another two dozen toons are nearing the final illustration stage, and hundreds more exist in drawing-board stages viewable on the Web site.
"Howtoon parties" serve as a laboratory for testing new projects on kids (and their parents). So far, MIT alumni have been the most visible participants at the parties, Griffith says. "They are a wonderful resource because they are a population of people who grew up making weird stuff." For instance, you can credit alumnus Brian Hughes '71 with perfecting the Howtoons hovercraft project by substituting a CD—which kids have in surplus—for the paper plate of the first iteration.
The CD, combined with the clever use of a twist-on bottle cap and a balloon, makes a craft that can hover for nearly two minutes.
"The big challenge is turning an interesting project into a one-page story," Bonsen says. "It is a very demanding format." And unlike the how-to books of the early 1900s, Howtoons acknowledge that girls like to build stuff, too. Many Howtoons feature the characters Celine and Tucker, who engage in a little friendly boy-girl rivalry in order to build a better mousetrap. Future toons will describe multicultural projects, including a model of an outrigger canoe from the Marshall Islands, a helicopter toy popularized in Zimbabwe, and a steamboat from India.
"There are one billion kids in our target age group worldwide," Bonsen points out, a figure that reinforces the tagline at the end of many Howtoons: "The possibilities are endless." Bonsen sees no reason why Howtoons wouldn't appeal worldwide (like his beloved Tintin).
And if Griffith and Bonsen have their way, Howtoons will soon be inspiring kids from all nations to see beyond the world as it is...to the future they might build themselves.
By David M. Enders
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