Embracing play: alumna uses toys to teach kids about engineering
By leaning into her interdisciplinary mindset and following her passions, Natha Singhasaneh, MechE ’18, has found her place designing toys to teach kids about science and engineering at CrunchLabs.
It wasn’t until after Natha (Bam) Singhasaneh, MechE ‘18, spent a few years at startup companies, explored teaching, pursued a master’s, and joined a BattleBots team that she found her place at the intersection of all of the above. Today, Singhasaneh is a product designer at CrunchLabs where she designs toys that inspire kids to become creative problem solvers by evoking their curiosity in science and engineering.
“I’ve always felt that being interdisciplinary-minded made all the difference in my pursuits,” she said. “I am far from being an expert in everything, but being able to look at problems from different perspectives allows me to come up with creative and unique solutions.”
As an undergraduate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CMU, Singhassaneh was a researcher in Aaron Johnson’s Robomechanics Lab. There she drew inspiration from mountain goat hooves to study the underlying principles behind optimal surface grip and compliance for legged robots to improve their ability to maneuver steep and uneven surfaces. With minors in robotics and business, and a special interest in entrepreneurship, Singhasaneh went on to work in consumer product development at two different startups.
“Working in a startup environment was a good learning experience because I had the opportunity to do not just engineering, but also user research, marketing, business planning, and more,” she said. “I learned that being able to view a product in a holistic way is critical towards success. For example, it doesn’t matter how well you hone your product, if it doesn’t address a real need, no one will buy it. And as an engineer, it’s very easy to be focused on asking ‘how.’ But sometimes, it’s also important to take a step back and ask ‘why.’”
Like many during the Covid-19 pandemic, Singhasaneh was furloughed, but it didn’t slow her down.
“There was a math school across the street from my apartment, and I went up to their door and asked if they needed teachers. That job made me fall in love with working with kids.”
Singhasaneh explained that when working with students as young as six years old you have to challenge your assumptions of what they know and empathize with them.
“Their mental model of the world is completely different from our own,” she said. “Although teaching wasn’t always easy, receiving a message from a student at the end of class expressing his or her love for math made it all worthwhile.”
With a new found appreciation for interdisciplinary thinking, Singhasaneh enrolled in MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program where she practiced human-centered design and had her first experience designing toys.
“We didn’t start out the project knowing that we were going to design a toy. Instead, we found through research that a toy was the right solution to the problem we were trying to solve. This was when I started seeing toys as a medium that has great potential to communicate and bring about mindset and behavioral change.”
She dove deeper into her passion for creating meaningful experiences for children in her master’s thesis: Climate Change Conversations with Children: Making Sustainability Meaningful, Tangible, and Actionable. Utilizing human-centered design, she engaged various stakeholders to develop a framework for communicating sustainability to young children.
“When it comes to toys and play, the best kind is when you’re just having so much fun that you don’t even know you’re learning,” she said. “We called this ‘Sneaky Learning.’”
After designing a toy called the RumbleBug for a class project, Singhasaneh spent a summer in San Francisco interning at IDEO’s Play Lab as a toy inventor where she further gained exposure to the toy industry.
We shouldn’t be afraid to play and explore because that's how we garner new perspectives, fail in unexpected ways, and are propelled to create change and bring new things to the world.
Natha “Bam” Singhasaneh, Product Desiger, CrunchLabs
“The toy space is a really fun space to be creative in,” she said. “Empathy is at the heart of it because you have to put yourself in the kids’ shoes. However, you also have to be mindful about what parents want their kids to gain from playing with the toys. Parents don’t want just another piece of plastic glitter, they want to see value in it.”
It was around this same time that a friend talked her into joining a BattleBots team where she learned a lot about hands-on engineering, design iteration, and the value of failure.
“It’s also rewarding to see many young kids get excited watching robots fight and grow curious about engineering.
At her current role as a product designer at CrunchLabs, Singhasaneh is using toys to inspire and teach kids about science and engineering.
One toy she designed allows kids to build their own treasure chest with a unique combination code that can only be opened with a corresponding key.
“To me, to play means to explore without a purpose, and to engage in activities without fear of failure—even an expectation of it. And play is not just for kids! We shouldn’t be afraid to play and explore because it’s by doing that that we garner new perspectives, fail in unexpected ways, and are propelled to create change and bring new things to the world.”