inventor Archives - NAPPA Awards

We’re excited to introduce you to entrepreneur and dad Jordan Weiner, the founder behind the 2020 NAPPA Award winning How to Be Good Behavioral Learning Kits.

Jordan Weiner with daughter Lauren Alexa.

We would love for our readers to get to know you better. Tell us a little about your daily life.

In addition to investing time daily in children’s educational businesses I also own Internet Consulting, Inc. Working on these businesses aren’t work to me – it’s play. I am a single father, which is my most important job/love. I truly live an American Dream fairytale life, which I am grateful to the core of my being. Everyday I wake up and wonder how did I get to be so lucky in life, and I try and give back as much as possible.

One of my favorite parts of the job is seeing our illustrators bring our characters and products to life. Knowing our work will help kids strengthen and expand life skills and self-worth. The work is chicken noodle soup for my mind, heart, and soul. Seeing and hearing the kids, parents, grandparents, teachers, nannies, babysitters, counselors, and therapists all say how much they love our materials makes getting all the details done fun.

What was your motivation behind launching this company and developing these behavior education kits?

How To Be Good For Santa was my daughter’s, Lauren Alexa Weiner’s, flash of genius when she was only 7 years old. She was playing a SIM’s game and building an online bookstore when I asked her what some of the titles of her books where. She rattled off some amazing titles such as “The Meaning of Life” and I forget most of the others … but when she said “How To Be Good For Santa” I immediately knew that it was a flash of genius because what kid doesn’t want to know the secrets for how to be good for Santa and what parent wouldn’t instantly by that product as long as it was truly top tier award winning materials that would genuinely help their kid(s) build life skills?

A few of my motivation goals for launching this business where to show my daughter that she has million dollar ideas, to help her learn real business in the business world, and to help her get into a top college by brining her idea to fruition. Other core motivational goals are to genuinely help kids have fun learning to build life skills and making it easy for guardians to have access to award winning materials that help their kids live happy and wonderful lives.

I help a lot of businesses and people with Internet Consulting, Inc., which is what is funding How To Be Good For Santa and How To Be Good with Polly the Parrot (The Polly the Parrot product versions are for people that don’t believe in Santa and for the educational market). By the time I die, I want to leave something truly humanitarianly beneficial behind – and what better way to invest time, money and my human resources than helping children build life skills and self-worth? The pay it forward returns are exponential.

Our products are amazing, with hand illustrated water colored animal characters that kids, parents/grand parents, teachers/educators, counselors/therapists, and everyone that sees them love.

Why do you think character development is so important for kids?

Helping children build life skills and self-worth provides a solid foundation for them to do well and feel good about who they are. If we invest a little time, efforts and resources while the children are learning how to act it truly helps all stakeholders. Knowledge is power. Kids minds are sponges, by being a little proactive instead of reactive we can increase our children’s positive to negative ratio, helping them know how to be safe, how to act properly so the ongoing cause and effect is in a positive direction. An evolutionary advantage humans have is the ability to create tools and pass knowledge down through our generations… so our children don’t have to recreate the wheel for experiences we know have already learned. Investing time helping kids with their character development will pay exponentially in their lives as well as the lives they influence.

What do you enjoy doing when not working?

I love raising my daughter, spending quality time with my family and friends. Playing any type of game, watching quality movies, I love to cook and feed the people in my life, I used to love to travel but the pandemic put a stop to that for a while.

Favorite place to be with your family?

Anywhere as long as I am with family and friends. I’ve done everything from parachute to scuba dive and try all types of experiences in my life’s journey. I truly appreciate the nuances of life and living in the moment, the where and what are not as important as the with who.

Best life advice?

One of my characters Georgey the Gerbil who specializes in greeting people nicely sums up my best advice in life “Run through life happy and free while treating others with dignity!” A couple other Jordanisms are everyone goes through ups and downs and you must make it through the lows to get to the highs. Positive actions usually get positive reactions and negativity usually gets negative responses so for your own best interest it is best to be kind to others. I also believe that you can only do so much with your own hands and thoughts and that to truly leverage yourself and ideas in life you need to work well with others by building a strong relationships with quality people. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and/or admit to being wrong. Live to learn and enjoy the ride, you only go through this life once so try and be kind and help everyone, so you don’t have any regrets.

Best advice for dads?

Say and do positive things for the kids, role model how you want your kids to act, and most important is time on task… spend as much time with your kids as possible and they will turn out knowing they were loved and be good humans.

We spoke with Nick Metzler, an L.A.-based toy and game designer who began inventing and tinkering when he was a kid. At just 16-years-old, Nick won first place in the Young Inventor Challenge (Y.I.C.), a unique competition for kids ages 6-18 to showcase their talents and get a chance to have their toy or game manufactured. Nick won again the following year, and his game Squashed was put in stores. With an impressive collection of work under his belt, Nick now works for Spin Master, a leading toy and game producer. Nick is eager to give back to the Y.I.C. community and help other kids realize their creativity and potential.

What interests did you have as a child that led you to inventing?

My childhood was naturally creative. When my mom heard I was bored, she’d instruct me to go to the recycling bin, dump it out, and make something with whatever was in the bin. Fake water parks, new shelves for my room, artistic projects, the possibilities were endless! I also loved making ‘contraptions’ which I recently learned were actually named ‘Rube Goldbergs’. I used to take anything and everything from my house and turn it into a contraption- hot wheels, cans, bouncy balls, dominoes, strings, card houses, and more. I loved creating systems that worked with just a little push, it excited me to see those ideas come to life. As a game inventor, now I design environments that can foster emotions that I’d like the players to experience. With just a little push, they can have memorable fun experiences with their friends and family!

What can parents do to encourage their child’s imagination?

Creation happens when you break away from the intended use of objects. It happens when you ask: “Can this food become a space ship?” or “Can I turn this lump of wood and metal into a Survivor challenge?” Creation is a function of combining disparate concepts, things that shouldn’t normally happen. It’s that smashing of random stuff together that makes invention happen. As adults, we call this innovation- taking a previously working gizmo and making it achieve the same goal in a more efficient way, perhaps by borrowing a solution from a completely different discipline. Parents can encourage imagination by challenging their children to solve problems with objects on hand, even though a magic bullet is right beside you. Children have an innate desire to continue tinkering even through failure, because they believe the solution to be possible. It’s only in adulthood that we block that urge with embarrassment of failure and feelings of self-doubt. Break away from the intended use of products, use lipstick as a marker, use packing peanuts as fake snow, use holographic Kleenex boxes as the backgrounds for your self-designed trading card series! Make your life a little more inefficient and it’ll spark creativity. Don’t give your kids the answers. Give them the goal and the rules of the game and they’ll start to create strategies themselves.

How did you transform your passion for inventing into a career?

Turning my passion for inventing into a career sort of happened by accident, and a good chunk of luck. My mom saw an ad in the newspaper for the Chicago Toy and Game Fair (ChiTAG)(the only toy and game fair open to the public in the nation) and told my sister and I that we were going. I wasn’t super psyched about it at the time, but I liked games so I went along not knowing that it was going to shape the next several years of my life. There, I saw the Young Inventor’s Challenge. The Y.I.C. was like a science fair, but for toys and games, and there was only a few entries. I walked around and wasn’t super impressed with the entries…having made 20 of my own games to this point. Within 20 minutes of looking at the competition I told my mom that I was going to win it the year after. One year later I won the senior division with a game called That’s Cheating!, a board game version of B.S. where the best cheater wins. I had an absolute blast with the competition and got a chance to meet the President of the Chicago Toy and Game Fair. She said that the ChiTAG Y.I.C. needed some advertising help, and I agreed to expand the Y.I.C. to several schools in the area. To help, I was put on the news and in magazines, all of which grew the Y.I.C. by 500% in one year to 250 entries. I entered again the year after with a game called Squashed and became the Y.I.C.’s first back-to-back winner. Squashed was licensed the following day by Tim Kimber, CEO of PlaySmart, where Squashed lives today. That really made a splash. That, plus a solid, short career in the industry has resulted in being named the Young Inventor of the Year for the entire industry in 2013, and I’m now a finalist for the Rising Star Innovator of the Year. Please vote if you think I earned it. I’m in the 4th category.

Can you tell us a little bit about any projects you’re looking forward to?

I can’t say much about any projects I’m currently working on, since I’m under NDA (non-disclosure agreement), but in the recent past I’ve consulted as a Survivor challenge designer, a theme park ride designer, an immersive theater gameplay director, and more. I’m currently developing a game show run entirely online, and also just started running a Facebook group called Gaming Life, which is focused on applying game metaphors and game ideas to improving your career and life. I have the unique ability to apply game design to any medium and I intend to use it to transform the world into one that is unbelievably fun for anyone who wants to play in it. There is one game that’s coming out December 1st, 2018 though that I’m particularly excited about- it’s called Good Question and you’ll need an Alexa device to play. Just pick a card from the deck to start. On the card is a single word. Your job is to get Alexa to say that word, without saying the word yourself. You can ask any question you want. It’s quite fun, especially with a group. Here’s a sample–Get Alexa to say the following words: Hour, Pepper, Unicorn, Bolt. There’s tons of words in the game, with more rules to play with, but you can play the basic game right in your home, right now. Don’t forget to ask a Good Question.

What is the Young Inventor Challenge and how can kids get involved?

The Young Inventor’s Challenge is always in October. So this is a great time to think about next year’s competition. You can start researching it this year and compete next year. That strategy worked out well for me. If you’re in L.A. instead of Chicago, never fear- there’s a video submission option. I’m not sure if these options can win (they might be able to), but they’ll definitely get judge feedback. All the judges are members of the industry who all have a desire to give back and mentor the next generation of inventors, so it’s quite a supportive community. Here’s the link to register for the Y.I.C.

What is the best advice you ever received regarding harnessing your creativity?

The best advice that I’ve ever received to harness my creativity is to take something I like, find something I can make better about it, and try to make it. Use anything at your immediate disposal and improve over time. It’s how I started designing games. I hated how long the moves in chess took. I just wanted a faster game, so I made one called extreme chess. It was a lot more carnage. Every move basically resulted in losing a piece, or if you used the cannon, you could wipe out entire columns in one shot. I tinkered a bunch with classic games to make my own. Back when I was young, making a game ‘better’ just meant making it more of what I wanted. As I grew older and realized my sister hated playing strategy games with me, I made those same games better by adding a bit of luck, even though I personally didn’t like the addition. It was better because it was more fun for everyone else around me.

If you could tell your 8-year-old self one thing, what would it be?

The future of cryptology is in computers, not ciphers. Also, you’re going to love meat in the future. Crazy concept I know. And burritos. When you hit college you won’t even be able to count the foods you like on 2 hands. Also, a slice of pizza every day for a full summer is a bad idea.