COMBINE CODING WITH ACTIVE PLAY AND PUT IT IN EVERY CLASSROOM
chief creative officer // brand identity // creative direction // app & product design // company culture & leadership
PLAY IS AN INSTINCT.
A FORCE.
Unruly Splats are programmable floor tiles that allow students to control lights, sounds, and scoring to create and play their own active games in any classroom using our block coding app.
When I first joined Unruly, I was brought on to help bring the product to market by designing and building a block-based coding app (with Unity developer, Humberto Machuca) that connects to the Splats via Bluetooth, and allows users to control their Splats to make their own active games. I then designed the retail packaging, and we were off and running!
MORE THAN HARDWARE
We moved away from retail sales to focus exclusively on the education market, so we designed an Unruly membership program that offered so much more to schools than just hardware.
We created a full-service cross-curricular K-8 CS program, designed to incorporate CS and active play in all types of classrooms throughout an entire school.
This required us to build a new user portal for educators to manage their class rosters, as well as get instant access to content, competitions, and more.
A BRAND APART
Unruly adjective : not readily ruled, disciplined, or managed
Choosing the name Unruly for an EdTech company/product that is designed for use in schools is a bold statement. There was no way that I could have designed a passive brand system that would live up to the name. There was no room for whispering. It had to be a SCREAM. I designed a brand that was bold & electric, with designs that reflected the action, movement, and energy of the Unruly experience. And of course, becasue it’s me, there had to be a healthy dose of humor thrown in. I was more inspired by the art and design of skateboarding culture than I was by anything else happening in EdTech. I approached it as a counterculture to the EdTech trends and norms that are currently, and safely, lining classroom shelves and (worse yet) closets. We had to break some rules.
UNRULY BRAND GUIDELINES SAMPLE
IMPACT!
In addition to selling the first product with a built in fart machine 💨 to schools in every state in the US…
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From Kickstarter to memberships in schools in all 50 states in the US (and growing in Canada!)
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Multiple active STEM competitons with live leaderboard results, allowing schools across the US and Canada to compete against each other in real time!
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A rapidly growing community of Unruly educators are creating and sharing new content and ideas for using Splats across all types of classrooms.
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Partnership with 2X Super Bowl champion, and New England Patriot, Jonathan Jones's Next Step foundation charity.