Announcing: GameBender

Hello Creative World! This is Jay Silver, the founder and CEO of Makey Makey.

I’m here to announce our new sister company which will soon (May 29th!!) release a wildly creative new product, but first a little about the adventure we’ve all been on together.

It’s been seven years, 1 million products shipped, and a lot of creative confidence bloomed in hearts across the world. Thank you for inspiring us every day!!! We’ve seen kids design technology for people with different abilities. We’ve been mentioned on the Simpsons (I know that’s not technically important but we were stoked). We were inducted into the permanent collection at the MoMA. We’ve laughed and cried and been carried by our amazing community of creators and educators further down the “World as Construction Kit” path than we thought was possible. What a deluge of creative inventions you all have made! In our own small way, our community has reinvented what it means to play with circuits and invent on the fly in thousands of schools, museums, libraries, makerspaces, bedrooms, and secret lairs.

For the past four years, we have been working on something big. We want to bring as much creativity to the digital world as we have brought to bananas, cats, and high fives. We have been researching the fundamentals of how creativity works in the digital world and how we can super charge it with special tools, immersive experiences, and social learning.

This new sister company to Makey Makey is called… GameBender. We will relentlessly pursue an entirely new type of digital world creativity. We are dedicated to social learning — imagine learning code side by side while playing, talking, and hanging out. We are also very serious about immersion as the best way to learn languages (including coding). We are partnered with Scratch, which I helped launch 12 years ago, and which now has 40 million users.

“GameBender will bring the power and magic of coding to kids in a totally new way,” said Andrew Sliwinski, Co-director of Scratch.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, our mission will always be aligned with education as a highest priority.

Next week on May 29th, we will bare our hearts and souls to you with our newest creation, just as you have done time and time again for us during the last seven years.

Thanks for being a part of this creative revolution. Gratefully,