When Paul and Alyssa Boswell started a Kickstarter campaign for a game designed to teach kids about computers, they thought it would take awhile to reach their $48,000 goal.
Instead, it took them about 14 hours to reach their goal and nine days later, the Shoreview couple raised nearly $200,000. Over the course of the month-long campaign, 4,198 donors pledged $404,071 to the cause.
The Turing Tumble requires no batteries or chargers and looks like a Plinko board, with marbles and plastic parts that form the mechanics of a computer. A marble starts at the top of the board and rolls through pins and switching pieces, before hitting a flipper at the bottom, releasing another marble from the top of the board.
Users assemble the parts to have the game add, subtract, multiply, divide, create patterns and more. A book packaged with the game was going to include 51 puzzles to solve on the board. But because the Boswells reached a goal of $400,000 on the Kickstarter campaign, they'll create nine more puzzles, for a total of 60. There will also be an educator's online version of the puzzle book, as well as a website where users can share their own puzzles and creations. While Paul Boswell was a professor at the University of Minnesota, he noticed a lot of his students didn't have programming skills, but could have used them. He started thinking of ways to teach children how to program and saw board games trying to do it. Those were simple, based on paper boards, he said, but it was tedious to run long programs.
"I started thinking about how you could make a game where the program runs itself," Paul Boswell said.
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He thought more about mechanical computers and came up with the Turing Tumble, named after Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer. At first, Alyssa Boswell didn't think much of her husband's idea, until he showed her the boards he was working on. Even when she saw the full-sized board, she thought it would only appeal to a small group of people.
"I just didn't expect that there would be broad interest at all," she said. "I don't think either of us knew how popular it would become."
The Boswells had no idea their concept would take off on Kickstarter as much as it did. They were pumped to see their goal met the first day, Paul Boswell said, and figured donations would plateau.
"It just kept going, we were pretty shocked," he said.
In the first day of the campaign, the Boswells recognized most of the names of the people who backed the project, Alyssa Boswell said, because they were friends and family members. Soon, though, donations started pouring in from across the world, she said, including one woman in Vietnam who messaged back and forth with the Boswells before donating. The woman thought the Boswells were representatives from a company selling the Turing Tumble, not the developers themselves.
"I said, 'nope, we are the company,'" Alyssa Boswell said. "She was so thrilled."
A man in the Netherlands made an electronic version of the game people can try on the internet, Paul Boswell said, after the Kickstarter campaign had been up for about a week. The Boswells found out a lot of Kickstarters are run by larger companies, Alyssa Boswell said, and look like a pre-order for a new product. Not many backers realized the Turing Tumble team consisted of the Boswells and an artist. Near the end of the campaign, fans would answer questions on the page to help the short-handed Turing Tumble team.
"They enjoyed being a part of a Kickstarter that wasn't a glorified pre-order," Alyssa Boswell said. "It really was a start-up company with just three people working on it."
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They'll be able to ship to Canada, Australia and the European Union. During the funding period, seven backers donated $1,000 or more, guaranteeing them a Turing Tumble and 20 copies to go to a school or classroom of their choice.
Quite a few people in Pillager and Brainerd purchased Turing Tumbles, so there might be some games used in area schools. It'll be a cool feeling for Boswell, who grew up in Pillager, to know some kids there will be playing with the Turing Tumble.
It took about two years to go from the original concept to a prototype that could be produced on a larger scale, Paul Boswell said. Initially, pieces were 3-D printed, before progressing to injection molding.
Paul Boswell is currently taking three months off from work to sort out manufacturing, packaging and shipping details. They're hoping to ship out the first order of about 5,000 Turing Tumbles so people get them in January 2018.
"It's a long way off, but there's a lot to do between now and then," Alyssa Boswell said.
The Boswells want to turn the Turing Tumble into a full-time business, but for now, they're going to see how things go with the first round of orders from Kickstarter, Paul Boswell said.
"I think there's a space for educational games that are more fun and go deeper than a lot of the games out there," he said.
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