Kenneth Lafferty Hess | |
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Born | Warren, Ohio, USA | January 22, 1953
Alma mater | Stanford Harvard |
Occupation(s) | Science Buddies Founder and President |
Kenneth Lafferty Hess (born January 22, 1953) is an engineer, author, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Hess is the founder and president of Science Buddies, a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering science literacy through the creation of free resources and services for K-12 students, teachers, and families. He holds one of the first software patents ever granted [1] and has designed and/or developed dozens of commercial software, content, and Internet products, including Family Tree Maker, one of the all-time best-selling home software programs. Among his awards are a PC Magazine Editor's Choice, PC Magazine Top 100 Web Site, a Codie award and a Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE). [2]
As a ninth-grader, Hess' science fair project involved using a dentist's X-ray machine to test a cloud chamber he had built. [3] Hess was interested in observing the trails of the radioactive particles as they moved through the chamber. Later, as a parent, Hess observed his daughter's success and enjoyment of the science fair process.
At the same time, he recognized that many students lack the resources and support they need to get the maximum educational benefit from a science fair project. With a goal of supporting students from all walks of life (as well as their teachers, parents, and schools) in doing science research projects, Hess founded Science Buddies in 2001 under the umbrella of the Kenneth Lafferty Hess Family Charitable Foundation. (The organization formalized its name change to Science Buddies in 2010. [4] )
Since the inception of Science Buddies, Hess has led the organization in creating an innovative library of resources designed to enrich and support science education. These resources include 1000+ scientist-vetted project ideas in more than 30 scientific fields, a Topic Selection Wizard to help students find exciting and appropriate science and engineering projects, tools and materials for classroom use, guides to help science-fair administrators, and a complete project guide to help students with all steps of conducting a science or engineering project. During 2010, 9.8 million unique individuals visited the Science Buddies website, a number equal to ~18% of U.S. students in grades K–12. [5]
As a testament to the quality of resources Hess has implemented and developed at Science Buddies to meet the needs of K-12 educators and to help bridge the gap between researchers and K-12 students, Science Buddies was awarded the prestigious Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) in April 2011. [6] SPORE awards are given by Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Prior to launching his first company, Hess worked at Intel Corporation, Teradyne, Hewlett-Packard, and Symantec. He founded Banner Blue Software in 1984. Tapping into a growing societal interest in genealogy and personal ancestry, Banner Blue developed Family Tree Maker, genealogy software that enabled users to locate and organize ancestral information. [7] During the first half of 1996, Family Tree Maker was one of three top-selling personal productivity product lines, according to PC Data. Banner Blue also developed Org Plus, a tool for creating corporate organization charts. A version of Org Plus, labeled Microsoft Organization Chart, was bundled into copies of Microsoft Office for many years. Hess wrote the initial versions of both Family Tree Maker and Org Plus and designed the initial version of Family Tree Maker Online. [8]
Hess' success with Banner Blue Software was an exercise in "bootstrapping." [9] Starting the company with a personal investment of $20,000, Hess bootstrapped Banner Blue Software into a company with 100 employees and annual sales of $25 million (and approximately 2 million copies of Family Tree Maker sold) when Broderbund Software, Inc. acquired it in 1995. [10] Hess outlined the success of Banner Blue and his "bootstrapping" approach in Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch.
In 1999, Hess co-founded Pocket Express, a company that designed and manufactured software for Palm pocket computers. Pocket Express' product line was sold to Handmark, Inc. in 2002. [11]
In 2024, Hess was selected in a suborbital spacefight mission to fly on a planned Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-25 in April 2024. [12] The others members of the crew are Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Carol Schaller, Gopichand Thotakura and Ed Dwight, a former US Air Force Captain. [13]
Hess was born in Warren, Ohio, to Phyllis Lafferty Hess and Richard Morton Hess. After graduating from Howland High School in 1971, Hess attended Stanford University where he earned a BS in Engineering. His course of study was interdisciplinary with emphasis in engineering, computer science, and political science. Following Stanford, Hess received an MBA from Harvard.
Hess and his wife, Constance, have one daughter, Amber. Hess' personal interests include photography and astronomy. Combining his interest in photography, astro-photography, and science literacy, Hess has authored the following Science Buddies resources and materials:
In general, bootstrapping usually refers to a self-starting process that is supposed to continue or grow without external input.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer in many aspects of computer science. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
Broderbund Software, Inc. was an American maker of video games, educational software, and productivity tools. Broderbund is best known for the 8-bit video game hits Choplifter, Lode Runner, Karateka, and Prince of Persia, as well as The Print Shop—originally for printing signs and banners on dot matrix printers—and the Myst and Carmen Sandiego games. The company was founded in Eugene, Oregon, and moved to San Rafael, California, then later to Novato, California. Broderbund was purchased by SoftKey in 1998.
Collaboration is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. Teams that work collaboratively often access greater resources, recognition and rewards when facing competition for finite resources.
The Print Shop is a desktop publishing software package originally published in 1984 by Broderbund. It was unique in that it provided libraries of clip art and templates through a simple interface to build signs, posters and banners with household dot-matrix printers. Over the years, the software has been updated to accommodate changing file formats and printer technologies.
Family Tree Maker is genealogy software for Windows and Mac that allows the researcher to keep track of information collected during research and to create reports, charts, and books containing that information. The software was originally developed by Kenneth Hess of Banner Blue Software, which was purchased by Broderbund in 1995. It passed through the hands of The Learning Company, SoftKey, Mattel, and others before coming under its current ownership. A redesigned Family Tree Maker 2008 was released on August 14, 2007. The 2009 version of the program corrected some of the errors and omissions of its predecessor, and introduced a few new features. Family Tree Maker 2010 claimed to further enhance the radical redesign and be more powerful and feature-packed with faster navigation and quicker load times.
Living Books is a series of interactive read-along adventures aimed at children aged 3–9. Created by Mark Schlichting, the series was mostly developed by Living Books for CD-ROM and published by Broderbund for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. Two decades after the original release, the series was re-released by Wanderful Interactive Storybooks for iOS and Android.
SoftKey International was a software company founded by Kevin O'Leary in 1986 in Toronto, Ontario. It was known as The Learning Company from 1995 to 1999 after acquiring The Learning Company and taking its name.
Bootstrapping is any test or metric that uses random sampling with replacement, and falls under the broader class of resampling methods. Bootstrapping assigns measures of accuracy to sample estimates. This technique allows estimation of the sampling distribution of almost any statistic using random sampling methods.
The JB Institute of Engineering and Technology (JBIET) (autonomous) is a technical institute located in Amdapur X (Cross) Roads, near Chilkur, Hyderabad, India. It is 22 km (14 mi) from the city center. It has an intake of more than 1050 students.
Scratch is a high-level, block-based visual programming language and website aimed primarily at children as an educational tool, with a target audience of ages 8 to 16. Users on the site can create projects on the website using a block-like interface. Scratch was conceived and designed through collaborative National Science Foundation grants awarded to Mitchel Resnick and Yasmin Kafai. Scratch is developed by the MIT Media Lab and has been translated into 70+ languages, being used in most parts of the world. Scratch is taught and used in after-school centers, schools, and colleges, as well as other public knowledge institutions. As of 15 February 2023, community statistics on the language's official website show more than 123 million projects shared by over 103 million users, over 804 million total projects ever created, and more than 95 million monthly website visits.
The Sheffield Software Engineering Observatory (Observatory) was founded in 2005 by an EPSRC grant at the University of Sheffield. The Observatory is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield.
Ask A Biologist is a science outreach program originating from Arizona State University's School of Life Sciences, a unit of the ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather than an encyclopedia. It is available in many languages.
Science Buddies, formerly the Kenneth Lafferty Hess Family Charitable Foundation, is a non-profit organization that provides a website of free science project productivity tools and mentoring to support K-12 students, especially for science fairs. Founded in 2001 by engineer and high-tech businessman, Kenneth Hess, Science Buddies features STEM content and services to assist students and educators. Since its founding, it has expanded its original mission to provide teacher resources targeted for classroom and science fair use.
Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time is a 1997 edutainment point-and-click adventure game developed by Broderbund for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh devices. The game is a remake of the 1989 time-travel title Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, making it the second Time video game in the Carmen Sandiego franchise. The game was strongly influenced by the short-lived PBS game show, Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?. The game was previewed at the 1997 Toy Fair in New York City. A demo version was included on the CD for Carmen Sandiego Word Detective and was available on the Carmen Sandiego website. After Broderbund was sold to The Learning Company, the game was re-released with the new title - Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time - but with minimal redesign.
Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? is a 1989 edutainment video game. It is the fourth game in the Carmen Sandiego video game series after World (1985), U.S.A. (1986), and Europe (1988). Having observed the popularity of the Carmen Sandiego franchise in the education of school children, educators were inspired to develop a North Dakota version to teach North Dakotans about their state's history and geography.
Carmen Sandiego Days have been popular across United States schools since they were first held in 1988. Inspired by the Carmen Sandiego franchise, these days see schools hold week-long Carmen Sandiego-themed events, aided by packs and prizes originally provided by Broderbund, and later by the franchises' subsequent owners after The Learning Company's acquisition of Broderbund in 1998. The 30th Carmen Sandiego Day took place on January 8, 2018.
Sridhar Vembu is an Indian billionaire business magnate and the founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation. According to Forbes, he is the 55th richest person in India with a net worth of $3.75 billion, as of 2021. He was awarded India's fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, in 2021.