Use the littleBits website to upload projects and contribute to their forum.
Benefits:
Free creative and technical consultation.
Swag and access to product sneak peaks.
15% discount, swag and product sneak peaks.
Opportunity to sell littleBits in Makerspace.
Access to a global network of other spaces to share knowledge and expertise.
My response that I wasn’t interested, but I would share it around to others. I think they are asking us to do their marketing for them, at our own expense. The benefits we receive are very limited, while they expect us to make a large up front investment in them, and contribute time to building their community.
If they offered a whole load of free product I could see the value in it for the space but personally I think as nice as the product and idea might be, they are asking for a lot and giving nothing of real value in return.
I agree, if there were a load of free product involved then yes, but this cost loads to set up, and potentially loads in terms of time to maintain. Nice Marketing wheeze though.
None of those benefits are tangible. Not to mention the $1k upfront cost.
Organisational cost is somewhat moot, as doing anything worthwhile incurs that… but yeah, our definition of worthwhile at the moment has to be work on the arch itself, not what we could do with a finished space.
I’d strongly advise against it. I’m a trained teacher, have led many workshops and even designed an electronics kit. I often rant about tech companies trying to mess with education. The truth is the LB kit has little educational value, it makes more sense to use breadboards and have the students build circuits from the scratch. Where’s the learning value in snapping circuits together? What’s the point if student have little idea how the circuits work? Also, $1k upfront? WTF? You could equip multiple schools with breadboards and components for ten years from this money. Kit companies make more money of selling kits than organising workshops. This thing is just a scheme to sell their products. May I add, I tried littleBits stuff before and they’re brilliant. It’s just they’re not suitable for education. I’d be happy to teach electronics and even design a kit, just contact me!