Summary
Promoting STEM education and environmental awareness among children through The Adventures of Scout. In this engaging conversation, co-founders Nick Parker and Matt Baron of The Adventures of Scout discuss their mission to inspire the next generation through children's literature focused on environmental awareness and STEM education. They share insights into their creative process, the impact of their books on children, and the importance of community engagement and partnerships. The discussion also highlights the role of technology in education and their vision for future growth and impact.
“Technology is at the forefront of everything."
The Adventures of Scout is a children's book series that aims to inspire the next generation of problem solvers to protect the planet, promoting STEM education and environmental awareness among children.
https://www.the3engineers.com/
Takeaways
Tech4Good South West aims to amplify technology's positive impact.
The Adventures of Scout is designed to inspire young problem solvers.
The creative process involved extensive brainstorming and collaboration.
Scout's books have reached over a quarter of a million children.
Partnerships with organizations enhance the reach and impact of Scout.
Technology plays a crucial role in modern education and outreach.
Environmental awareness is a key theme in Scout's stories.
Collaboration is essential for driving real change in communities.
Future plans include expanding Scout's brand and educational resources.
Community engagement is vital for promoting literacy and environmental stewardship.
Chapters
00:00Introduction to Tech4Good South West
01:52The Adventures of Scout: A New Approach to Children's Literature
06:36The Creative Process Behind Scout's Development
11:24The Impact of Scout's Books on Children
17:07Partnerships and Community Engagement
21:28Tech for Good: The Role of Technology in Education
26:15Vision for Change: Environmental Awareness and Education
31:36Future Plans for Scout and The Three Engineers
Transcript
Tech4Good South West (00:03.168)
At Tech4Good South West, we're passionate about building momentum for the Tech4Good movement across the South West of the UK. Our mission is to amplify the positive impact of technology in tackling societal challenges and creating stronger, fairer and more connected communities. By fostering a regional Tech4Good community, we aim to support initiatives that ensure technology serves the greater good and enable everyone to thrive in the long term.
Throughout this podcast, we'll be joined by a diverse range of voices from across the tech sector, charities, investors, startups, and community-driven projects, as they share their stories, challenges, and hopes in harnessing Tech For Good. Join us as we explore a world of Tech For Good right here in the Southwest, brought to you by Annie, Alicia, and Ariel. Good afternoon, everyone. Alicia here from the Tech For Good Southwest podcast.
I hope you all had a wonderful summer cause this is likely to be live in September or October. Today I am joined by Matt and Nick, who are the two co-founders of the three engineers and also the creators of the Adventures of Scout. I am obsessed by Scout. I'm obsessed with what they're doing and I'm so excited to have them on the podcast today to talk about everything that they've created, plans for the future.
and just cover what real impact is. It's a little bit different what we're going to talk about today, but I think the opportunity for them to make the world a better place, inspire the next generation will inspire a lot of people. talking about using the word inspire for the third time, in terms of what Scout is. So Scout is out to inspire the next generation of problem solvers to help protect our planet and
The three engineers do this through a fun rhyming children's book series, which features an amazing inquisitive young girl called Scout, who likes to figure things out. There's the rhyme, but that's just a little drop in the ocean of what they're doing. And I don't want to take the limelight away from the two of them. So without further ado, and Nick, welcome. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about, yeah, what you do day to day and the three engineers.
Tech4Good South West (02:21.31)
Yeah, lovely to be on this, and lovely to see you again. Yeah, my name's Nick. I'm a co-founder of the Adventures of Scout children's book series. But back in 2018, both myself, Matt and John, that we're all engineers working together, decided that we want to do a side project. And basically that's how we connected on this journey. Pass you on to Matt. Yeah. Hi, Alicia. Yeah, great to be on the podcast. I'm Matt. I'm also an engineer.
co-founder of the three engineers back in 2018. And yeah, I think this is a third podcast I've been on. it's pretty, pretty exciting. I'm pretty new to it. Yeah. We'll do our best. You're a veteran. Three podcasts. That's, that's good going. Have they all been about Scout? They have. Yeah. Awesome. What does day to day look like for both of you? I know you're engineers, but that's a relatively broad job title. What do you, what do you actually sort of do day to day?
I'm a systems engineer, so I have to deal with requirements and all the boring stuff like that and make sure that all of the different design teams kind of currently pull together the complex problems and we come up with solutions and work with the customer. So a bit like an account manager. Matt? Yeah, so day to day for me, I've recently gone contracting as a contract engineer. So working for myself. I'm doing systems engineering as well, although I originally was a mechanical engineer.
qualified as mechanical engineer. And then when I'm not doing that, I'm chasing around after my two kids who take up a lot of my time. renovating. And renovating a house. yeah, yeah. I've got two weeks off to renovate the house. Well, the bathroom, just the bathroom. Excellent. So how did the three engineers come about? Lunchtimes.
That's where we would normally go on walks. We would probably moan about work. And we would just be like, wouldn't it be great if we had an idea and do something different that kind of really helped and impacted the world? And I think Matt was brave enough to say, let's stop whinging. Let's put some time aside. Let's use our system engineering tools and processes to kind of map out an idea, which I thought was actually kind of like, yeah, eureka moment. We could actually do that because we take things from concept design anyway.
Tech4Good South West (04:42.592)
all the way through to through life. So why could we not try and apply that to a different idea? Yeah. So cause we all had Friday afternoons, we didn't have to work Friday afternoons, the place we were working. So rather than spend the time in the pub, just chatting nonsense. Yeah. I booked out five, five weeks where we all got together and I bought a load of sharpie pens, colored sharpie pens. Cause I love
whiteboarding and mind mapping. So we did loads of different things like spray diagrams, mind maps, and yeah, we did like scoring matrices to figure out which of our ideas were the best for us. Yeah, Venn diagrams of all of our interests and all of our common things that we were interested in and our goals. So yeah, it came together in that five weeks and...
Yeah, for some reason we decided, wouldn't it be great to write some children's books? Having never done that before and had no idea how to do it. I think there's another thing to add, which is quite a funny story, was that we want to map our weaknesses and what things we were good at, but John was my boss and Matt was our big boss. So trying to have those conversations at that point was quite revealing. We all came out of it unscathed, but I was very much looking across at Matt being like, can I say this?
You took it well. Excellent. So lunchtime's into now three books, but we'll go on to the story of how those three books have been created. But please tell everyone, I'm sure they're like, who is Scout? What are they doing? What is the adventures of Scout and what are you trying to achieve? Should I take this one, Matt? Go for it. Right. Well, we didn't know we wanted to write kids books. So that's the main thing that we need to...
highlight here is that we had lots of different ideas and when kids books was announced my head hit the table because I was like we love maths I do not like English I can't believe we're go down the route of rhyming and then Matt was like we need to make them rhyme which made me again and like reach for a pint and I was just like my god but then we we kind of very very quickly came up with a vision that was kind of like could we look at all the other successful kind of impactful kids characters out there
Tech4Good South West (07:07.182)
Like Harry Potter, we have possibly a character that grew over time? Could we reach the heights of Dora the Explorer and have that kind of reach? And then we were thinking about all the best bits and we were really passionate about promoting STEM, especially young girls into engineering when we were graduates and we kind of loved that. So when we kind of collected all these notes and it just came up with the idea of, well, let's just write some fun rhyming kids books about a young girl. She could be a problem solver. She could then...
know, her missions or adventure she goes on are actually to help the environment because I was massively into picking at that point. And we just kept thinking, well, there's so many things we're hitting here. We could be inclusive, we could be hitting STEM, we could hit an environment. And then when we're looking at marketing routes, we could just see, well, wouldn't it be amazing if we could kind of partner with experts in the field if we could somehow create something amazing such that our tool was an engaging resource.
But then you followed up by experts and other people inspiring others to take action. And we just thought that the kind of younger age group was the right place to target because they're the most innocent, pure, they want to kind of follow steps. it just felt right, didn't it? Yeah, was definitely, I had two very young children at that point as well. So I was reading dozens of Julia Donaldson stories and Harry McCleary and things like that. So.
I was sort of in that zone and the idea of Scout as a character, our main sort of protagonist with a little mate, a little poison dart frog Vinny, which is a bit random, we thought why not? Yeah, we just wanted to get across a character that was thoughtful, kind, caring, and used
sort of understanding of the world to like do better things, make it better. So yeah, that's how Scout came about. Love that. And I am going to put some links obviously on the podcast to the website, Instagram, just some pictures, because one thing, and I think I've said to Nick so many times that I'm mainly obsessed with is your illustrator who blows my mind.
Tech4Good South West (09:29.71)
and just what she's created with the books. Because is this right? Is it like two million brushstrokes make up each book? Is that right? The book series, yeah. Let's tell about, yeah, let's go to our illustrator because we can't take all the glory here because she is incredible. She's from Georgia, Eastern Europe. name's Anna Bratishvili. And I found we kind of when we first started before we put pen to paper, we were looking at kind of crowdfunding and different kind of options, what we could do in the future.
and a founder on a crowdfund. And it was just because she had a time lapse video of this amazing image. And I was thinking, if we've to think about marketing, how could we kind of offer something different, especially if we're going to kind of tell people about our journey and we could almost bring people on the journey as we're creating these ridiculously stupid fag packet sketches, pass them over to this wizardess of a lady that can kind of turn these illustrations into something magical. And yeah, there's too many in brushstrokes in our
in the book series. It's looking like there's going to be well over a million in our fourth book that we'll come on to in a bit. They are just insane. She just does everything on Procreate on her iPad. yeah, I think when we first, she turned us down four times as well for the project. So I kept hassling her, I kept hassling her and she was like, not sure, I'm not sure. Eventually she said yes. And it was like, whoa, we now got an illustrator on board. It's time to take it a little bit more seriously than just Fridays down the pub. Love that.
So there's three books in the series at the moment. I know fourth is underway or finished. Yeah. So I'm working on the fourth book at the minute, Alicia, while Nick's sort of taking the business sort of forward and growing the business and getting all these volunteers in to do great stuff. The fourth book's a bit of a different tact. So it took quite a long time to write three stories.
And did them all at the same time as well. We wrote them all concurrently. I've got ideas for other storybooks, but it takes a long time, about a year to actually come to a final script on such a short book. So this one is all about the illustrations. It's a Where's Wally type book. So it's a search and find book. It's going to be bigger than our existing storybooks and...
Tech4Good South West (11:53.31)
all of the spreads are all different like landscapes like environments so like rainforests, rivers, the last one that Anne's doing is a woodland scene and Vinnie, our little poison dart frog, has five other amphibious friends and they're all hidden around the picture and pictures are crazy they're absolutely crazy and yeah you've got to try and find them
So, and then there's messaging in the back about the different environments and how humans impact them both in good and bad ways. So yeah, still on the environmental theme. I'll add something to that as well, because when we first mapped out that very first kind of plot of like, would our book series look like? We definitely looked at Dore and she had this pink gorilla and we were just thinking, well, we've got someone like that, like a dog or a cat. We're like, no, no, we've got artistic license here. Let's go just be silly. Let's just create something funny like Vinnie.
And he's a poison dart frog. And yeah, we always knew we were going to do a spin-off book because we were like, we've got the three and we'll do a Where's What eco-feme style book. And hopefully maybe Vinnie could take off in his own right because the book is of such good quality, Matt's done such a good job with Anne that yeah, it's going to blow. It's insane. illustrations. Scout's still in it though. Scout is still in it. She's on every page still doing the cool stuff that she does.
But yeah, this one's called Fine Vinnie. Yeah. Love that. What are the three books focused on? Just so people know, because obviously I want to tag that and hopefully loads of people buy the books off the back of this podcast. But what are the three books called and what's their focus? So we basically wanted to design books that could be inclusive. We noticed through the research that we did that we couldn't find really like a protagonist that took things forward and was inclusive. Not only just learning about the problem, but doing something about it.
So I was a litter pick at the time, but actually the first Eureka moment was the bees book. think we kind of came up with an idea. Let me backtrack even more. We basically did four months of research in bookshops and we analyzed Julia Donelson's rhyming patterns. And we basically created an analysis tool to kind of look at kind of the, we were looking at syllable counts and the number of the words. And I think what happened was we,
Tech4Good South West (14:16.706)
We then kind of each went off to try and figure out if we could come up with an idea for each book. So I came up with The Missing Bees, which is all about planting seeds to feed the missing bees. And you couldn't go and tell children that the bees are getting massacred by pesticides and things like that. So we came up with a really nice idea where there's just not enough flowers to keep them all active. So they're up at the archaic where the lights are attractive. And the idea there was kind of we could kind of meet three animals similar to the Gruffalo that are affected by the problem. So a hummingbird without kind of
flowers to drink from, a bear that's got no honey, and then the queen bees lost all the bees because they're up at the arcade basically just mucking about really. And then the kind of the idea is that you then have Scout coming up with a really cool idea of having a picnic, repurposing a garden, growing some flowers and then everyone's happy. And then I think Matt came up with the Stop Dropping Litter book, Matt. Do want to tell a bit more about that one? Yeah, yeah. So like our three books, Stop Dropping Litter, The Missing Bees and
animal rescue. Nick's told you about the missing bees. Stop dropping litter. I'm from Cornwall originally and when I go back to visit my mum, there's always so much litter compared to when I was growing up, washed up on the beach. So that story is about Scout finding her local beach covered in rubbish and she has to figure out how it's getting there and it's basically washing in from
waterways in town where people are dropping litter and it's washing out to sea and then coming up onto shore. again, she meets three animals that are all have a bit of an issue with that and helps them out. And they cover over the pipe that's spewing out all this litter and clean up the beach. And then our third book, Animal Rescue, that was one that our friend John started and wrote the ideas for. And that one's about upcycling household waste.
to help animals in sort of local habitats. So trying to teach children to do things to help wildlife in their local area, whether it's urban or rural. And yeah, we've got three like UK animals in that one, a bearded beetle, who's a lumberjack and he needs more deadwood to eat stuff. A hedgehog, who's a punk hedgehog and a red squirrel.
Tech4Good South West (16:41.422)
So those are our three books and Scout goes on a little journey helping all these animals, solving problems and taking action. Amazing. Well, I know, I know your numbers and what you've reached, but yeah, how many children have you reached so far? So think we've reached just over a quarter of a million children since 2022, even though we've all got full-time jobs, which is pretty amazing.
Yeah, we managed to, we went into schools. initially we actually, yeah, we wrote some scripts and we went into some schools with a PowerPoint, with a Doryd Explorer images and things all cut and pasted into our storyboards to kind of read. And we thought at that point that that would be a really good place to trial and also a really good target audience or market to sell to. And then we realized through like all the volunteers and all the teachers that helped us that the schools were under so much pressure. Like there is no way that that is what we're to be doing. And we kind of then spun.
kind of the angle of where we were going with, well, with social value being such a huge thing now in the corporate world, we should be speaking to corporates in our local areas and let's see if they can get books purchased and get them into schools to help and local communities and disprivileged children. yeah, we've also managed to sell 15,000 books and get them distributed into libraries and schools to promote literacy, which is just amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. And you've got a couple of partnerships now, haven't you? Yeah, yeah. So,
Exciting times for us actually. Nick's been working really hard networking. I suppose our first, partnership was with the STEM hub. So that sort of started back in lockdown really, where we took those sort of school visits that we were doing like in person and, use the technology like Teams live. We swapped from a PowerPoint to a piece of software presentation software called Prezi.
was like zooms in and out of the images and stuff. It's really cool. And yeah, we started doing virtual STEM talks and virtual book reads and things like that. And that's how we've managed to reach so many more children using that technology and working virtually. Yeah. So that's a STEM hub. We've done some great in-person sort of charity events over the last three years with promoting children in Plymouth. So one of our employers, very big down in Plymouth.
Tech4Good South West (19:04.586)
And we had some contacts down there and basically Plymouth's got some very deprived areas. Children have never owned a book before. So us and some of the big corporations like donated some books and we went down there for the day. And we've done this for the last three years for World Book Day. And we go around and there's like dozens of volunteers that go to all the schools in Plymouth, all the primary schools and they read our books and then give the books to the
schools for the library and they ask questions. We have like the town mayor and the MP and different people like that. But yeah, it's a fantastic experience. Well worth it seeing the look on the kids faces when they get the book and ask us loads of random questions. You're in the zone and then someone puts a hand up and like says the most obscure like question and then you're just like, no, I'm in of the whole assembly of kids. This is not great. Do you like peanut butter? And you're like, yeah, yeah.
To be fair, had some kids come in to SR2 and I wasn't there, but they asked Chris whether he would give them a million, a million pound. He then really seriously just said, you be open to giving me a million pounds? I love kids. You guys are on the Tech for Good Southwest podcast and the next generation
Like we need to do so much more, only for the environment, but yeah, technology is at the forefront of absolutely everything revolving around the world at the moment. And yeah, I do. It worries me every day in terms of the future, like massively about sort of diversity. For example, like only 15 % of girls took GCSE's computer last year compared to 43 % in 2015, which we thought it was bad then. Like we're getting worse when...
Technology is only evolving. So like trying to educate and inspire this next generation through things like scout and some other really cool things that are about is, is so important, but in terms of sort of, that's why I think scout and the three engineers and what you're doing is tech for impact. but what does that mean for you? Like what, what is tech for good tech for impact to you? So.
Tech4Good South West (21:28.148)
One really good example actually, which links back to one of our latest partnerships is with the Rivers Trust. Big, big charity. The guy we talked to there, super, super excited about Rivers and River Health. Knows all the facts. But we're working with them because Scout is their first virtual ambassador. Okay. So we're using
our brand of scout as a, as a virtual character to actually create content for this charity to promote improving river quality and river health. And yeah, just, just been able to use technology in terms of how we can communicate nowadays. It's so easy and so quick being able to reach so many children and have like cool virtual talks as if you were in the room with them. I think is.
is really good and we're using the technology available to us as best we can to get our message out. Yeah and on my side I think Scout's amazing because we can hit two major things we can really like you know inspire kids to care and learn about the environment and the Rivers Trust as Matt said they're going to basically help create some educational content like maybe some school schemers and some stuff so they can go in and kind of reach a different demograph than what they're normally
kind of reach which is just amazing. And another partnership we've got which is called with the Institute of Chemical Engineers. So again in our wildest dreams we probably laughed and joked about saying we're going to have this impact and reach these people and sign up with partnerships and collaborate with them but never did we think it would happen. Yeah they're taking on our books as the primary stem resource to with their chemical engineers and again I guess back to your question it's kind of well
There is a gap. We are super passionate about not only encouraging young girls into STEM, but all kids into STEM because there's a mass that think it costs like 1.5 billion pounds to the UK economy and each year for having a lack of STEM kind of resources. And by partnering and collaborating with these people, we can create different types of content to appeal to more children to try and promote them into STEM. that's the beauty of this project is that we've got two angles that we're both passionate about.
Tech4Good South West (23:49.728)
And it's just a, it's a really cool mechanism. And there's so much tech out there that we haven't even used. We're too scared to use AI at the moment and kind of all of the other tools that are out there to help us grow. And I'm sure we will one day accelerate and be able to create tons more stuff. yeah, one step at a time. Yeah. I also think our, our character scout and the fact that we're engineers and we've taken what we do as a day job, which is all big bits of metal and.
control systems and things like that and going, we can apply those skills to writing children's book and creating art. Cause, cause we design the pictures and just turns them into fantastic images, but we design them and draw these terrible pencil sketches. but they're, yeah, the, we can also talk to children and inspire children in that way through the technology of saying, well,
Just cause you're like maths or want to be an engineer doesn't mean you can't still do cool stuff and create art and videos and all this other stuff. because it's all available to everyone now through tech, through technology. I was speaking to this girl earlier and she's just designed, she said, never in my wildest dreams did I think, yeah, the impact that I have, but she, she designed all the graphics for the Olympics. So like when all the medals.
the rank of medals comes up, sort of the graphics that sit behind it. And she's like, like, imagine how many millions of people have seen my work. I didn't think when she started to started, well, when she was at school, she said, I didn't think that that was technology or that's what technology would be used for. But it is. So it is, it's such an education piece that you're not going to be stuck in a dark room with no windows in front of a computer just all day. There's so much more to technology and yeah.
the way that you're sort of educating and inspiring. It's so special. And I can't wait for people to see. I hope I've teased it enough that people are like, I need to see a picture of scout. What does she look like? that's, that's hope. Cool. In terms of what change you would most like to see and what do we need to do to get there, but what change would you most like to see? And I think we might have answered it a little bit.
Tech4Good South West (26:15.15)
I personally, when I first started this with Matt, like I said, I was doing a lot of litter pick and I actually started a lockdown 500 where I wanted to challenge myself to pick up 500 kilograms of litter. And then basically me just doing it over and over day and posting it and kind of tagging it because that was kind of the book that we were created at the time. I got the whole community involved. We picked up like, well, over like 800 kilograms. But one of the things I was there was I was kind of like, the roads are so bad.
around the whole of the UK. It doesn't matter. I go cycling a lot. It's terrible. So I was kind of reaching out to all these amazing communities of litter pickers that were kind of measuring their bags as they pick rather than weight, whereas I was kind of going down the weight kind of route. And I realized quite quickly that, you know, we need to kind of have instead of kind of these big organizations or large charities with their own initiatives, we kind of like need a big blue Peter kind of something up the top there that just drives people to be passionate to go out and contribute because
Yes, I think we need collaborations and that's what we love that part of this. I think I can speak for you Matt as well. This we absolutely love collaborating is the most fun part of this project. But at the same time, they kind of like and I think that's the way we're to see real change is if we can all kind of work together because it's a system like with the whole the whole kind of litter cycle is a massive system and every single environmental kind of challenge is a system. We kind of need to get together and work together. I think that from my perspective, that's the that's the way things are going to change is like.
We don't, not just pockets. kind of grow together. We all help each other out to kind of get that message across and install, inspire and educate. Yeah. For me, it's very similar, Nick, I think, but from like a grassroots point of view, the, like children nowadays, like my kids are going through school at the minute. I've got a neighbor who's got a teenage daughter and I just see how stressed she is at like the amount
academically they're being pushed to like do these exams and tests, which is all very well to measure like intelligence in that way. But if we could teach children how to do basic things like care for their local area that they live and learn about plants and learn about animals and how to grow vegetables.
Tech4Good South West (28:42.51)
And things like that. think those are the things that are important now, I think. we're slowly, the world's coming around to go, no, yeah, those things are important. It's not all about whether I can like do Pythagoras theorem or remember my like 16 times table. Those things are great. it's like life skills, isn't it? Yeah. Life skills are so much more important. mean, yeah, I think I did.
I got, I got an A star in dance. Dance has never, never done me well today. But when I came out of school, no one, I didn't know what a pension was. And I didn't know about, about savings until, yeah, until I was older. But it's yeah. Then also, like you say, biodiversity and, and like day to day life is so educating around that is so much more important.
So I think there's so many young parents now that don't know those skills. So they're not teaching their kids those skills. and there's probably a symptom of technology where people are on their phones and live in virtually as opposed to in reality. yeah, you're sort of losing touch with the planet really. So I don't want to go too deep there. and dance is great cause it makes you laugh and releases in door pins.
There go. That's good. But yeah, I do want to put a big shout out to all of the amazing volunteers that are doing the good work out there. I've come across so many inspiring people that are leading communities, leading kind of like, just I can't really say, like inspiring me to go out there and actually do the community work, kind of help raise awareness of the issues and fix and I'm not waiting for someone else to just come and like fix it. Like let's go and do it ourselves.
So just want a big shout out to all volunteers that do the great stuff. No, of course. And one thing I'm going to say is technology volunteers have supported these guys with project, but I know that they really need some help with their website at the moment. It is live on technology volunteers. Again, I'll tag it on the post, but if you're an engineer or you know anyone who can help with sort of the website, website design for
Tech4Good South West (31:06.686)
for the three engineers slash scout, then yeah, please check it out because I need a couple of updates and changes on there. Last question, what's next? What's next for scout? What's next for three engineers? I know you said the fourth book, but anything else? I'm on the, so we basically managed to get on the Bristol NatWest entrepreneur accelerator program, which has been absolutely wonderful experience.
given me about a gazillion more tasks to consider and all the business aspects to align. But I've had some fantastic help from corporations and social value by giving me their specialisms to help me kind of with business plans and marketing plans and things. I think we're going to hold, we're going to stop ideas for books at the moment and we're going to kind of let Anne, I think she's craving less detailed work and going off and doing a bit more of her own stuff.
And then we're to try and plug these books. But we've got an army of teachers and kind of graphic designers helping us create resources, because that's what we wanted to do away from the books, is that we wanted to give school talks around any major day of the year. We have Scout and all the different characters. We can create amazing resources that you don't need to buy off Twinkle. They're free. But yeah, think long term, we'd love to make Scout a household brand, a big brand. We're going to probably try and go for a cartoon. I think that's what I'm going to sign myself up for.
And who knows, like, you know, if you could imagine getting the reach of Dora the Explorer around the globe, but yet you've got a positive role model like Captain Planet. Do you remember Captain Planet in the day? No. No? He was basically what Power Rangers stole. He was like a guy that came in with me, different rings, had like Earth, weird, fire. And then off the back of that, all the colours and these heroes came, like Captain Planet came around and I reckon Power Rangers stole the idea, if I'm honest, but that's true in my age.
How cool would it be if kids actually have a positive role model to look up to? And I would absolutely love Vinnie to be like little Pingu series. So doesn't say any words, but just kind of goes around doing cool things with his mates. brilliant. A Ribbit is a frog, isn't it? I was trying to think what noise a frog makes. Pingu just like, he kind of like just squeaks, doesn't he? Matt, what's next for you? Apart from the renovation and...
Tech4Good South West (33:30.606)
running after two kids? Yeah, so I need to get this fourth book finished. So I'm sort of more short term goals whilst Nick's looking long term. So book finished, gonna create some colour in books as well on the way. So create some more, I suppose, products that we can promote to go on the website. And then, yeah, it'll be helping Nick shape the vision and
hit the marketing because we've basically done no marketing since 2018 and we're turning over enough revenue to keep going and pay all our overheads and things. we're not doing things badly, but I think we could do them so much better and at such a bigger scale as well. Matt reigns me in. kind of come up with these long big visions and then Matt kind of pulls the reins a little bit and keeps me in check, which is great.
I've also been in meetings with you. Awesome. Well, look, thank you so much as they I think Scout is incredible. think there's such a huge opportunity. Love that you are obviously Bristol, but wider Southwest based in the amount of impact that you're making sort of locally is very much needed and very special. If Tech for Good can support you in any way, then let us know. But otherwise, yeah, for all the listeners, please check out.
website which I'm going to tag. Please buy the books, they're incredible. You will not see anything like it. I'm about to be a mum and so I'm very much going into the children's book world. I have got the books in her room ready to go. But in terms of yeah, they're just very special and I think they're different. I think they could say have a huge impact so please support them.
Are you both happy if anyone wants to reach out, ask you any questions? Are you happy for me to include social handles, et cetera? Absolutely. Yeah. Any investors out there as well? You never miss an opportunity, Nick. Never miss an opportunity. You've got to drop it in. You never know who's listening. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Great to speak to you both and yeah, best of luck with everything for the three engineers and for Scalp.
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