Detective Dot

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Ada Lovelace

IT’S ADA’S DAY WEEK! 

Here’s a hit list of other amazing STEM people Dot wants to be friends with.

Jess Wade

Detective Dot’s IRL best friend spreads joy daily using her wit, intellect and doodling skills. Her physics PhD comes in handy when Dot needs help with super-tiny-nano clues. Jess also advocates relentlessly for equal access to STEM education. Happy Birthday Wade 💥💥💥 We hope NASA made you a cake. YES, YOU HEARD US RIGHT, OUR BESTIE IS AT NASA RIGHT NOW.

Shirly Jackson

No known relationship to Michael, Shirly made a LOADS of things that help us live in 2017. From caller ID to fibre optic cables, Shirly has made fielding scary calls from your mum and faster Netflix download speeds a whole lot easier.

2. Elizabeth Magie

You know that boardgame you get out once a year with your family only to fight over who really took the money from Free Parking 🚕? You have Elizabeth Magie to thank for that.

3. Norma Sklarek

Ever looked up at a building and thought ‘WOW - I wonder who build that’? Norma Sklarek, probably. She made some AY MAY ZING buildings. Being the first African-American female architect in 1954 she faced a bunch of obstacles like Ada, but continued to strive and make her own path.

4. Roya Mahboob

Even though we are 100% anti-homework, we don’t mind the classroom. Especially now we have digital classrooms and multimedia learning platforms, thanks to Roya.. One of the first Female tech CEOs in Afghanistan she is paving the way for a new generation 💻

5. Sunita Williams

Marathons are difficult. We think. We’ve never done one.  But for Sunita, a normal gravity filled marathon was a piece of space-cake. She completed the Boston marathon IN SPACE 🛰, making her the first person to ever do so.

We love all these women and what they’ve done, and so would’ve Ada.

Peace, Love + Code

Psssssst don’t forget to use LOVELACE at the checkout to get 15% off your next order

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September At Detective Dots

Quite a bit actually. From our CEO being named as one of Computer Weekly's Most Influential Women in Tech 2017 🎉🎉 to a trip to Paris with EDF to recruit some frenchies to the CIA, we’ve barely had time to complete our missions. Thankfully our CIA operatives are on the job

Latest mission statement from Agent *** (whose identity remains confidential)

Amidst all of this, we’ve added a new face to the team, mainly to ensure that we don’t think LOL means lots of love. In her first week, Savena has been sorting out a bunch of CIA missions and finding a new home for our real CEO (Cuddle Enforcement Officer). And writing newsletters in the third person.

                  We’re sad to see our comms wizard Arfah leave to complete her Winston Churchill Fellowship, exploring Muslim women in technology. Travelling across America, Pakistan and the UAE, Arfah is meeting movers, shakers and ice-cream-makers (maybe). If you miss Arfah too, you can find her on Facebook, Twitter and Youtubeand can find a cute gif of a Llama here.

Celebrations

A special Eid Mubarak and Shana Tova to everyone. And Good luck to all school starters, whether you’re entering KS1 or teaching year 9s, we wish you a year of reduced homework. Let the uniform-fitting, stationary-hoarding and packed-lunch-trading commence!

Stuff we like on the internet

Still baffled by the magic of contactless payments? Then prepare yourself for TechTats.

Algobrix - a kickstarter looking to fund a little robot which teaches kids how to code. Sweet

Climeworks - Taking the hot air out of Climate Change as they make products out of C02

WARNING: Reading Detective Dot will make you funnier

And before you go don’t forget to use AUTUMNSALE at the checkout to get 15% off a Detective Dot order today! Or tomorrow! Or the day after that!

Peace, code and love Sophie + Co

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EDF + The Book Club with No Books

We’ve been hanging out with our friends at EDF Energy again! This time our creator Sophie went to talk to all the lovely innovators at the Blue Lab away day at The Book Club in London.

It turns out this isn’t actually a book club, which is  a bit confusing. Perhaps all the books have been stolen? We’ll get the CIA on the case…

EDF are determined to improve the  lives of their customers through technology and Blue Labs is their platform to encourage innovation through the best talent. As well as being the UK's largest producer of low-carbon electricity they are working hard to encourage more kids into STEM - something we are so pleased to be part of.

We’ve been pals with EDF since December when we won their Pulse Award for inspiring young people into tech! 

👀 Watch this space 👀 for more updates on our partnership including bringing Detective Dot and the Children’s Intelligence Agency (the CIA) to 22,000 schools. That’s a LOT of mega-farting selfie sticks! 💩

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CIA Recruit at Imperial Festival

This month the CIA headed to the Imperial Science Festival in London on one very important mission: recruit new agents! Starting on Friday 5th May at 1000 hours, we challenged 6 local schools to complete our recruitment process:

Mission 1 = Code Cracking

Mission 2 = Poo Algorithm

Mission 3 = Debugging a Selfie Stick 

Mission 4 = Data Analysis 

Think you have what it takes? For a free copy of our recruitment task email [email protected] 

Agent Deen explains the importance of distracting enemies with unusually musical burps...

New CIA recruits ready for action...

After school's day it was time to prepare for the weekend - 18,000 visitors making their way to Imperial! 

Agents quickly understood the importance of keeping their identity top secret

MISSION COMPLETE

500 CIA Missions complete

Poo Algorithm sorted

Homework crimes under investigation

Analysis of diversity in top-selling kids books complete (watch this space for CIA’s Official Report)

<Peace, Love + Code>

Detective Dot + The CIA 

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Hot off the press: Detective Dot in the Telegraph!

So excited to have been featured in the Telegraph this week, in a IRL physical paper! You can read the full feature online here 👀

“Budge over James Bond; there’s a new spy in town – her name is Detective Dot and she’s on a mission to inspire the next generation of crack coders.”

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We’re expanding the Children’s Intelligence Agency to 22K schools with EDF!

We are SO chuffed to have won EDF’s Pulse Award for inspiring young people into tech! This means that we’ll be bringing Detective Dot and the Children’s Intelligence Agency (the CIA) to 22,000 schools across the UK with EDF. That’s a lot of new potential CIA agents! Kids will be doing important top-secret work for the CIA investigating things such as the Power of Poo 💩 How can harness the power of poo? Why do adults throw away this liquid gold despite evidence showing its potential to provide sustainable energy? Is bat poo really is explosive?  Are cow farts the cause of climate change? Lots of important work to be done!

Here’s our super important Old Age Agent (OAA) founder Sophie Deen presenting Detective Dot to the CEO of EDF (photo from Wired):

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Wowza, we won Barclay’s Everywoman Award!

Detective Dot’s mother Sophie Deen won FDM Barclay’s Everywoman Award as Startup Founder of the Year! Everywoman in Tech is an award celebrating the achievements of women working in tech and STEM.  We are honoured to have won an award alongside the other inspiring female leaders doing amazing work in tech. See intel about the winners here.

We hope Dot inspires more girls into tech with Holodoti (perfect for when you want to sneak out the house on top-secret missions) and all her other Level 10 inventions!

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Detective Dot <//> Mumsnet

Mums are the best. That’s why we’re so glad we got to launch Detective Dot surrounded by the lovely mums (and dads, grandparents, pets + a very special 2 year old called Jack) at Mumsnet Blogfest ‘16. We were chuffed by the enthusiasm for Detective Dot and what she stands for - poo jokes. And, of course, coding, diversity, equality, fairness and fun.

The whole D Team represented - our writer John, our illustrator Nathan, our resident physicist Jess Wade, Dot’s Grandma and Dot’s-Grandma’s-boyfriend!

Our illustrator Nathan MADE (not ordered) this picture board with leftover cardboard boxes! Here’s Jack, our favourite guest, inside it.  

Our amazing writer John taking stock on the day.

Cupcakes courtesy of the CIA’s Resident Physicist Jess Wade.

What we made! We are super proud.

Our writer John had a brilliant idea after the event.

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Detective Dot, IRL!

10 months ago (one month longer than it takes to get to Mars) we crowdfunded Detective Dot on Kickstarter, with backers from 30+ countries (thank you!). After lots of user testing and just the 160 rewrites, Detective Dot is here! We’re extremely proud of Detective Dot. Kids love it. Schools love it too. And so does President Barack Obama*.

*Not really.

Lexi, CIA agent, receives her top secret package. 

Here’s us packaging up your goodies.

And, there’s a surprise! Not only did we make the Detective Dot book, but we also made a Children’s Intelligence Agency membership pack, so that kids can join the CIA and get start asking difficult questions, asap. The goody pack comes complete with a shiny (biodegradable) membership card, 7 top-secret, super-important CIA missions, a personalised invitation to join the force, and CIA sticker badges. All kids can join the CIA here - www.ciakids.org/join.

You can get your mitts on Dot directly on our website. No middle men. No middle women. Unless you’d like the ebook, which is available on Amazon. The mothership of review hotspots. Or Google Books, iBooks, Kobo too.

A real child loves our book.

What’s that you said? You want to tell everyone you know about it but can’t be bothered to write the words? No problem, we did that here. And we snuck in discount codes.   

To our backers: We really want you to review Detective Dot on Amazon (you don’t need to repurchase the book), and most importantly, please send in your kids’ completed CIA missions.

Seriously, check out this CIA application that came in the mail.

Thanks again to all our amazing supporters!

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Detective Dot, imminently.

Thanks the amazing support of all our backers, friends and mentors, Detective Dot will be with us soon! Here’s some mostly unexpected stuff that happened along the way*:

We dreamt of writing a super cool, stereotype-defying story to inspire children everywhere and we made post-it fuelled plans to launch on Kickstarter. What could go wrong?

The first thing that went wrong is that we didn’t think about the fact our campaign would run over Christmas. When everyone is on holiday or busy thinking about reindeers. So December was spent without our normal appetite for Yorkshire puddings**.

We were sent to DC. We MET PRESIDENT OBAMA and he loved Dot.***

Meanwhile, back in storyland, the first version of D. Dot was over 50,000 words and too complicated for my mum. Story's now 20,000 words.

We’re agile hipsters, so in brave rebellion of publishing norms, we carried out seventeen rounds of user feedback. Along the way we lost Alara Hottaire (Shelly Belly’s annoying PR) and changed global retailer LargeMarge Inc. (large margins!) to Shelly Inc. Time consuming, but worth it.

The CIA visited schools. Teachers begged to join, but they were too old and too teachery.

Excellent feedback on v19. Except the bit where Dot sneaks her sidekick Drone through a scanner by reprogramming an x-ray machine ... because hacking at an international airport is never funny (even if you’re part of the Children’s Intelligence Agency!) and had some teachers worrying about radicalisation. Big rewrite, again.

All the changes to the story drive our illustrators Nathan and Nerea mad. Plus, we can’t decide where to put the appendix. Or is it a glossary. A Glappendix?

Thankfully, people continue to say lovely things about us. Makers lists Detective Dot one of 12 empowering books every girl should read. We’re ready.****

* We’re properly sorry for being late ** this isn’t true, but we did almost lose our appetites  *** also not true  **** If any of you are planning on doing something similar, we’d be more than happy to share our war stories with you over a cuppa.

We’re very excited. We know it’s not the most modest or British thing to say, but we totally love Detective Dot and we hope you will too!

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Detective Dot one of 12 empowering books every girl should read *blush*

Detective Dot was named one of 12 empowering books every girl should read by Makers! We’re chuffed to be listed alongside amazing titles like Rosie Revere Engineer and Hello Ruby. All of these books should be on your summer reading lists!

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CIA Spy Watch Development

The CIA Dept. of Inventions & Ideas is responsible for developing technology at the cutting edge of innovation, for the use of agents like Detective Dot.

Here, you can see stages of the design process for our new Spy Watch, conceived by Agent DJ*, aged 8. It allows users to instantly change disguise, which is very handy in high-risk missions.

Developmental Sketches

User Research

Interviews with 50 agents for user feedback and insights, which are fed into final designs.

Imah Barnarnah - “It’s important to have an emergency alert function, for situations where backup is required”

Mack A. Rooney - “It needs to look like a normal watch too”

Final designs

Stay tuned, next week we’ll post more CIA designed spy gadgets!

*All names have been changed to respect the privacy and safety of our agents

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Groundbreaking CIA images released

Because of the super-secret nature of the Children’s Intelligence Agency, getting an insight into its inner workings is a rare occurrence. However, on this occasion, we were granted special access to document our agents at work.

Agents developing spy gear prototypes using cutting-edge technology (Department of Inventions and Ideas)

Agents crunching data around representation and diversity in children’s stories (Department of Counterconditioning)

A heated debate on spy ethics takes place in a boardroom

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Sony copies CIA prototypes

Sony just issued a patent for contact lenses that can take pictures.

A tiny camera embedded in the lense captures images or videos of what you see with a blink of your eye. It can decipher between conscious and unconscious blinks by timing them - conscious blinks are fractions of a second longer. The camera can also focus and zoom.

We thought of this first, though.

Technology like this is particularly useful for Detective Dot and the CIA. Undercover work is hard and it’s essential to capture intel in the most discreet way possible.

What is little known is that Omar, one our own CIA agents, was already developing a very similar technology. Here’s an early blueprint:

The CIA’s ‘Spy Lens’ ™ is better. 

Because we can capture sound too…. but it’s not what you think! We ‘hear’ conversations by analysing footage of cleverly placed objects, like a crisp packet (or anything reflective - glass, mirrors etc). When sound hits a standard Cheese & Onion crisp packet, it makes it vibrate. This movement creates a very subtle visual signal that’s usually invisible to the naked eye, but can be captured by the CIA Spy Lens, and reconstructed back into sound!

The CIA lens is also better because as per Omar’s designs, it’s charged via light.

YEP… The *future* is here! Brought to you first by the CIA, then by Sony.

Sources: Article on Sony here and article on MIT’s audio Crisp Packet technology here.

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Dot’s big happy family

Louise: Teacher extraordinaire

Laura: Keeps our feet on the ground

Kemi: Draws stuff to help kids learn

Nathan: Extracts pictures from Sophie’s brain and puts them on the page

Not forgetting John (writer), Anna (community) and Nerea (illustrator), who are part of the family too, but happen not to be in this picture!

And Dot’s extended family are too big to name - you guys know who you are!

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30 metres of pizza

Detective Dot is part of Bethnal Green Ventures, an awesome accelerator program supporting tech-for good startups that’s backed by the Cabinet Office. Twice a year BGV take 9 people with good ideas under their wing and offer advice, training and office space.

GUESS WHAT though... Bethnal Green Ventures are not in Bethnal Green! That’s right people, BGV are actually based in the very stately Somerset House.

Last week was BGV’s Demo Day, a chance for all the startups to show off what we achieved by the end of the program.

Can you spot Sophie?

We made exciting stuff for our guests, including environmentally-friendly Detective Dot stickers…

We were also honoured to be asked to disseminate some top secret Children’s Intelligence Agency documents, by the CIA itself!

Detective Dot founder Sophie Deen was the first startup to deliver a 5 minute presentation (the perils of having a company name that starts with B).

Most importantly, we met loads of interesting people and made some pretty awesome new friends!

(this is the very lovely Polly chatting to an undercover CIA agent)

And second-most-importantly...PIZZA!

Big thanks to Bethnal Green Ventures for having us on your amazing program.

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European Finalists *blush*!

We were extremely excited to be invited to join the European finalists of the 1776 Challenge Cup! It’s for start up’s with innovative ideas to change the world.

We spent an intense two days meeting a lot of very cool people - advisors, mentors, peers, and supporters. At the end of the 48 hours, we had 2 mins to pitch our businesses to a room full of important people and a 4-person manel (AKA panel with males only. See more manels here).

And, the icing on the cake...our lovely friends Plauquechecker were selected for the final, and are being whizzed off to Washington in June. On a global mission to fight plaque with a super-easy smartphone app that takes pics of your teeth, Plaquechecker have an amazing business and are the nicest biomedical engineers you’ll ever meet.  

A big thanks for 1776 (particularly Noelle and Andrew) for inviting us to take part. It was an amazing experience, and 1776 is a brilliant programme. Wooop.