About Us

BirdBrain Technologies LLC was founded in 2010 by Tom Lauwers. For the last five years, Tom had been working on a Ph.D in the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute's CREATE lab. His work there focused on the creation and design of several robots, robot kits, and other electronic devices. His Ph.D describes a design process for how to align the capabilities and interface of these devices to a specific educational context.

The research process in which Tom engaged involved an iterative design cycle involving the creation of hardware and software, partnering with educators, pilots in real educational settings, and the evaluation of those pilots to create design parameters to feed into the next cycle. This process has been successful at creating educationally relevant tools in several different educational settings, including Finch and Hummingbird, BirdBrain's first and third products.

It is the goal of BirdBrain Technologies LLC, to take these research projects and sustain them by making them useful to the educational community. For each product released through BirdBrain Technologies, we create documentation, sample curricula, and tutorials to allow parents, teachers, and students to get up to speed with the technology quickly, so they can focus their time on using the device in creative and fun ways.