Empowering Healthy Kids Blog

Please visit http://www.zippeddy.com/contact-us.html to register your interest. Thanks!

I had the distinct pleasure of giving a talk to 100 or so kids about inventors and inventing. I had been trialling Zippeddy at this school and by luck, for this term, they were learning about inventions through the ages. I told them how I came up with the idea of Zippeddy and the process of creating such a product (along with the trials and tribulations). My observations:

• Kids are easily impressed with the smallest things (just a PCB circuit board with a few lights excites them) and like the fact that something made made “just for them” and looks cool.
• A sizable portion (about 30%) opened up electronic gadgets to see what was in them. I told to keep doing that
• One smart kid said”Are you going to make this in China, cos of the labour?” - I replied with the truth that the parts would be made in China but assembled here in Melbourne.
• Many (including the teachers) wanted to know how you come up with the idea. I replied by saying I wanted to make kids be physically active and I had the skills and knowledge in engineering to do this - thus the concept of a web enabled kids pedometer was born.
• One student asked how do I promote my product? I thought that this kid, not only understands inventing, but business as well.
• Many asked when it will be in shops. I replied that we are trying to get it into schools first, then into shops later.

Afterwards I stuck around and many more kids asked more questions. Some even pitched their ideas to me. Overall, I was impressed with their inquisitiveness and desire to create new things.

I have been working with the wonderful kids and teachers at Silverton Primary School. So far, feedback on Zippeddy has been positive and the students have been quite excited by it. They are also keen to add their 2c as well on how it can be improved too… which is great!

Follow trial updates via Twitter.

Part of the Zippeddy System is the user friendly software that automatically downloads your Activity Points from the Zippeddy Pedometer and stores and displays your progress. (Stay tuned for sneak preview product shots of the Zippeddy Pedometer later this month)

Features:
•    Automatically downloads, stores and displays data from your Zippeddy Pedometer.
•    5 “Blue Foot” levels - the more activity you do the higher level you get!
•    You can store a minute by minute history of your Activity Points.
•    Ability to view over an hour, day, week or month.
•    With a single click you can upload your Activity Points to Zippeddy.com so you can share your results with others! (Requires registration on Zippeddy.com)
•    Musical notes played depending on how much Activity you do.
•    A special administration screen for teachers to add or update user details.

Screenshots

Login

Results

Once you login, the Activity Points from the Zippeddy Pedometer is downloaded and stored on your computer. Then the following Results screen appears.

I thought I’d better start posting some of our progress with the Zippeddy technology. For more background information on Zippeddy please click here.

Below is a part screen shot of our Zippedy software. I put our Zippeddy pedometer into the pocket of my backpack. So basically we measured the amount of activity when I had the backpack on my back walking in the city. Next we downloaded the data on the pedometer using our software to produce this chart.

Note that the high bars before work and after work. The middle one that occurs between 2pm and 3pm is when I walking to a client site.

The axis on the left hand side is “Activity Points” where the more activity you do the higher the score.

UPDATE: if you would like to follow Zippeddy’s progress, please see the Zippeddy category and XML feed.

We have been hard at work on our Zippeddy activity system for kids. We have developed our initial version of our website at www.zippeddy.com.

Currently, we are accepting invitations from schools as part of our limited-Beta trial program. If you would like to participate please contact us.