Jay Silver
Founder and CEO of JoyLabz/Makey Makey
Innovation and Technology Speaker
Jay Silver Speaker Biography
Dr. Jay Silver is the Founder and CEO of JoyLabz/Makey Makey. He has invented many creative platforms such as Drawdio (Time’s Top 15 Toys for Young Geniuses) and Makey Makey (“Kickstarted” for $500,000, Pop Sci Best of ToyFair).
As the first ever Maker Research Scientist at Intel, CNN has called Jay “…a leading proponent of the Maker Movement”–an innovative rebirth of DIY (do it yourself) and DIWO (do it with others). With an emphasis on the whimsical, entrepreneurial and educational, the Maker Movement is considered one of the most powerful new innovative entrepreneurial forces in the world today. The most visceral instantiation of the Maker Movement are the dozens of Maker Faires held around the world.
Jay has been inducted into the permanent collection of MoMA, exhibited artwork internationally at many museums–including Arts Electronica and NT MOFA–and been named a “Top 100 Inspirational World Changer” by DELL.
Jay helped develop Scratch, an online programming language used by millions. His inventions have been licensed and productized by the world’s largest electronics and toy companies. Jay’s company bootstrapped $2 million in revenue in the first year and continues it’s rapid growth to date.
As a featured keynote speaker on innovation, creativity and technology, Jay has received rave reviews for his entertaining and inspiring presentations from audiences at TED, PopTech, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, IDEO, Microsoft, Google and many other global events. He has worked for companies and organizations ranging in diversity from Lincoln Labs (national defense research laboratory), to BellSouth, and UC San Diego.
Jay studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech where he was named Engineer of the Year. He was awarded a Gates Scholarship to earn a master’s in Internet Technology from Cambridge University. He also holds a master’s and PhD from MIT Media Lab where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow and Lemelson Prize winner for inventiveness. Jay’s MIT PhD thesis was “World as Construction Kit.” A popular class he taught at MIT was “Radical Design for Learning”; where students took action designing iterative learning situations with a focus on experiential and nontraditional learning modalities.
Jay sits on the board of directors of Maker Ed, One Day on Earth, and Sunseed Food; and works with teens at places like Not Back to School Camp. Jay believes that being a romantic is of the utmost importance.
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Speech Topics
The world is a Construction Kit
There are things happening all around us that are invisible unless we are looking for them. Bananas are a piano, pizza slices are slide clickers, and play dough or pencil drawings can control your Pac Man game.
The innate curiosity of all humans is examined through the eyes of a baby and then through teens in nature. Through examples from Jay Silver′s research at MIT Media Lab, we can see how off-the-shelf products can catalyze the inventor in us all. This isn′t a story about technical genius, it′s a story about everyday genius that every person can tap when they allow themselves to un-know reality long enough to have the momentary insight of the wild, undomesticated human mind.
Live Demo Options :
Spaghetti Drill: Let′s wake up! Simple, everyday transformations can bring a new perspective. A classic inventioneering trick is to take two things and put them together to make something new. How can you do this in your everyday life? Simple proof that primes the audience that the world is easily reformable.
MaKey MaKey Pizza Slide Clicker: Demo of MaKey MaKey with pizza slices (or whatever food is available). Full setup of MaKey MaKey – with a laptop – from top to bottom. This demo is especially important if MaKey MaKey′s are given to audience members as a gift. Jay shows how to creatively transform what the audience is doing right now (viewing slides from a computer) from plastic to pizza slide clicker.
Drawdio Paintbrush Demo (Ketchup / String): This crowd pleaser feels really magical because it has no computer. Just a paintbrush with a piano circuit which then paints sounds on an easel using ketchup as the paint. It can then be shown that string (and even spaghetti) can be played like a violin just by connecting them to the paintbrush using human fingers.
Scratch Programming: What does programming plus LEGO bricks look like? Scratch shows an example of massive collaboration by absolute beginners, using programming to make everything from Tetris to interactive art to customized prototypes. Free to download and use at home, fun for kids, and usable by novice adults, a Scratch demo shows how big ideas like “recursion” and “conditionals” and “for loops” can be experimented with the same way as LEGOs: through bottom up serendipity. If asked, I will show the first ever Scratch sample project I made when I was on the Scratch team, which is a breakdancing project, and I will try to perform (10 years later) some of the same breakdancing moves.
