Our Story
250 million children lack access to basic education. When you buy one of our kits, we donate one to a displaced child who lacks access to school and/or electricity, through our partners across eight countries.
Encouraging kids globally to build...
I started Ambessa because kids asked me to build a DIY torch during a volunteer coding workshop in East Africa. During my MSc in Child Development at the University of Oxford, I met our engineer Leo and soon after, our designer Meghna. We launched a super grassroots Kickstarter in 2023 and parents and teachers across 32 countries brought Ambessa to life. Now our kits are built all across the world from Manhattan schools to refugee camps.
- Sara
Ambessa to the moon!
Every detail of our kit comes from co-designing with children. This means real-world feedback, combined with research in child development. We built Ambessa with two hypotheses in mind:
1. Prioritarianism: If you design for the child who lacks resources (electricity/school etc), it'll work for many children.
2. If children can make the things around them, they will believe they can shape the world around them. We call this 'applied constructionism' and share more of our pedagogy in our zine here.
Ambessa means 'lion' in Eritrean and Ethiopian languages, but it's also what you say to a kid to say 'brilliant, strong or well done'.
Featured in...
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"33 Smart STEM Toys for the Techie Kids in Your Life: We found lots of math-filled and science-rich toys for tiny nerds to assemble, bake, squish—or even tear apart and rebuild."
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"Ambessa Play and Pentagram's DIY flashlight kit is co-designed with displaced children for practical, educational use."
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"Beyond in-built lessons about kinetic energy and electrical components, and the emotional lessons of self-efficacy and empowerment, there is a more subtle and broader lesson for the design community – form can (and often should) follow function, but function must first follow advice from future users."
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