Chattanooga State To Host littleBits Founder

  • Friday, October 11, 2013

Chattanooga State will welcome Ayah Bdeir, founder and CEO of littleBits to its campus on Oct. 30 at 6 p.m. The event, free and open to the public, will be held in the Health & Physical Fitness Center on the main campus of Chattanooga State Community College. Captioning will be provided for guests with hearing loss. 

Ayah Bdeir, founder and CEO of littleBits, is an engineer, and one of the leaders of the Maker movement, which “creates and markets products that are recreated and assembled using unused, discarded or broken electronic, plastic, silicon or virtually any raw material and/or product from a computer-related device” (Technopedia). 

Ms. Bdeir’s career and education have centered on advancing open source hardware to make education and innovation more accessible to people around the world. She is a co-founder of the Open Hardware Summit, an alumna of the MIT Media Lab and a TED Senior Fellow (her TED talk “Building blocks that blink, beep and teach” has more than 700,000 views). 

 According to Ms. Bdeir, “littleBits wants to make the world of electronics fun and accessible to people of all ages by breaking modern day technology down to its most fundamental parts. Our modules are designed to be easy-to-use to help inspire creativity and exploration among children, teens and adults.” 

Ms. Bdeir was named no.33 on FastCompany’s Most Creative People in Business for 2013. littleBits was named as one of CNN’s top 10 Emerging Startups to Watch and won over 18 toy and education awards. 

 For more information on this event, please contact Mary Knaff at 697-.3371.

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