"We have a general culture that passes on the idea that math is hard, and math is no fun, and math will be your punishment - instead of showing that it is creative and beautiful."

George Hart, a co-founder of
The National Museum of Mathematics

By pairing creativity with math, KOZO strives to change the perception that math is hard and inspire math learning in children. Math is fundamental for many STEM professions and is also a prerequisite for STEM high schools and colleges. Nurturing children's love of math through KOZO opens the doors to scientific, engineering, and technological careers.

KOZO is a geometric hook-and-loop construction set that improves STEM skills through craft, design, and collaboration.

It was originally designed for 8-17 year-old girls. However, regardless of age and gender, people who enjoy puzzles and mindful activities, or want to improve fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination can use it.

What is KOZO?

KOZO objects are very durable and satisfying to squeeze and play with. They can be enjoyed for a long time or be rebuilt into something new.

Why Build with KOZO?

KOZO designers build objects by crocheting geometric units together, only without using yarn but rather flexible connectors of various lengths.

By seeing patterns and imagining how to break complex forms down to geometric shapes, you will become a master of computational thinking.

You can invite your friends and bring your projects to life faster by coming up with a building strategy and sharing work between teammates.

What Can You Build with KOZO?

With KOZO, kids can create geometric 3D shapes, household objects, decorations, wearables, and much more. The possibilities are endless, with an infinite number of combinations you can make with just a few types of geometric pieces.

How Does It Work?

LEARN

Build convex, concave, and straight surfaces by joining geometric panels in different ways while learning math concepts in the process.

Combine these surfaces to build 3D shapes. Use pattern repetition to create a sense of unity in your symmetrical models.

COMBINE

CREATE

Use your skills and knowledge to create new 3D shapes from scratch by connecting parts that you already know how to build.

Get your friends and family involved to create useful objects for your home

Form a design team and work on art, engineering, and scientific projects

Use KOZO as an artistic medium to design and build with your community

Where Can You Collaborate with KOZO?

Enrich your STEM experiments with unique, hands-on KOZO math crafts

By letting children build, reconstruct, and play with hand-held geometric models, KOZO fosters curiosity in math and engineering and helps develop spatial skills, which is an ability to imagine and maneuver two- and three-dimensional objects mentally.

According to numerous studies, spatial skills strongly predict who will go into STEM fields. Developing these skills is especially important for girls as many of them lag behind boys in spatial ability, which might be one of the reasons why men vastly outnumber women in most STEM careers.

Helping Girls Succeed in STEM

Similar to crochet, KOZO requires children to actively use a hooking tool and fingers of both hands to join modules together and thus helps improve fine motor skills. This is especially important as hands-on hobbies in children continue to decline, possibly impacted by the prevalence of touch screen technology.

According to Dr. Maria Siemionow, a transplant surgeon who was interviewed for the New York Times's article "Your Surgeon’s Childhood Hobbies May Affect Your Health," hobbies like crochet not only develop dexterity, but also require a three-dimensional imagination, planning, patience and precision, which are crucial skills for surgeons and other skilled manual careers.

Helping Children Improve Hand Dexterity

Pilot Studies

As KOZO is emerging into the market, we are actively seeking insights by making prototypes, observing how children build and play with KOZO, getting feedback from teachers and caretakers, analyzing and making adjustments, and doing it all over again.

Workshop at a NYC Public School

To test interest and engagement, we ran a workshop at a New York City public school introducing KOZO to a group of girls and their teachers. We were thrilled that even after several weeks, teachers continued activities, as many girls asked to keep working on their KOZO projects.

Ms. Taryn Martinez

Living Environment (biology)
and literacy teacher,
8th grade

Living Environment
student teacher,
8th grade

Ms. Kirsten Farmer

"The students were extremely engaged and had a lot of fun. They asked about continuing to use the kits and wanted to purchase some for our school. They caught on to the motions very quickly and started being creative with their projects."

"The product's strengths include that the material doesn't break and it's very versatile. I could see it inspiring kids to be innovative and make their creative ideas into a tangible reality. I could also see KOZO being used in an engineering and design course."

What Do Children Say about KOZO?

During our pilot studies, we gathered some feedback from children through an anonymous survey, which was distributed after the workshop and through personal interviews after individual testing.

Names were changed to pseudonyms below in the interest of privacy.

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