Tumblehome Learning Board Meeting

Tumblehome Learning is now six months old. Friday we held our first official board meeting, with partners from Minneapolis and Taipei as well as Boston gathering here on the east coast. To kick off the meeting Thursday evening, our science kit guru Peter Wong organized us into three groups to compete in a series of scientific cooking challenges. These ranged from identifying different brands of cheese to designing foil devices that allowed us to pour black-and-tans while keeping the layers as separate as possible to estimating time to cook shrimp and beef with various cooking methods.

We laughed a lot, and I'm proud to say that the red team (my team) tied for first place in the salad dressing competition. Peter is quite a chef, and he used to teach a one-unit cooking course in the engineering department at Tufts. I think it was called "Heat Transfer in the Kitchen," or something like that.

Friday we spent working on vision. We are a company that inspires kids to imagine themselves as scientists and engineers through hands-on activities supported by books and online materials. We intend to put the kids'experience of science at the center, rather than defining ourselves as a publisher with ancillary materials. Two of our kits are already designed, which meant we spent some time looking at package design. Four of our first seven books are already written and two more are mostly written. We debated product mix for 2013, when we hope to have up to twelve new books. The big news on the book front is that we will officially begin accepting submissions on January 15, a week from today.

The rest of the meeting was about financial projections and job plans. I won't bore you with those. But I will encourage any of you who happen to be in Taiwan the first week in February to stop in and visit our booth at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, Booth A907 in Hall 1. You'll recognize us by the big posters of Selectra Volt, Dudette from the Future, and the boy hero of The Furious Case of the Fraudulent Fossil standing on a T. Rex skull.