Interview With Randi Zuckerberg About New Pop-Up Tech Café, Sue's Tech Kitchen

I recently sat down with Randi Zuckerberg, the creator of Sue’s Tech Kitchen, at her STEM-inspired foodie space on Roosevelt Island. We discussed the inspiration behind the pop-up and why getting introduced to STEM is so important for kids of all ages, as well as what Zuckerberg thinks the future of tech holds.

Zuckerberg described Sue’s Tech Kitchen as, "Part arcade, part high-tech food café, part performance and museum exhibit." The pop-up includes a 4-D theater, virtual reality experiences created by the NBA, and the ever popular 3-D printed s'mores. The first thing one notices is that although this place is loaded with technological activities, there is not a screen in sight, which is completely intentional and goes hand-in-hand with Zuckerberg's belief that there are "thousands of ways to introduce children to technology that doesn’t involve screens."

Check out the interview with Randi Zuckerberg below and also be sure to visit Sue's Tech Kitchen, which opened Saturday, Nov. 25 and will be around until Monday, Jan. 1, 2018 at The Bridge at Cornell Tech, 11 East Loop Road on Roosevelt Island.

How did you come up with the idea for Sue’s Tech Kitchen? 
My two big passions in the post-Silicon Valley era of my career are getting more girls into tech and STEM, and also as I have been doing a lot more traveling of the country, trying to bridge some of the glaring skills-gap that exists. We have people in big cities that have access to great education and these kids will be super prepared for the next economy of jobs, but then you have millions of kids who are going to be totally left behind because they don’t have that access. For me, I’ve really dedicated this next chapter of my career to how to create things that are entertaining and fun and engaging that can get all children into to tech so that the next billion-dollar companies of the future have more diversity. So for me, as I was thinking about it [creating Sue's Tech Kitchen], I thought, 'What do kids love? How do you engage them?' Well, all kids love snacks and games and play and I have a show on TV right now called Dot, and as I was dreaming up my next character, I just kept thinking about this girl Sue who loves science and who loves cooking and who makes all these zany recipes in her kitchen and I just thought, 'Why don’t we just open up her restaurant to all of her friends?'

Can you take us through the process of creating Sue's Tech Kitchen? 
At first I thought it was going to be a book, with the character "Sue Chef" (a play on words). It was going to be a children’s fiction book meets cookbook with all these crazy things you can do with science. As I was working on it, I thought, 'I feel like Sue would be more entrepreneurial than this. She would just open up her kitchen to her friends.' So I stared looking and nothing like this really existed. So we did a pilot this summer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, we called it our "Beta Taste." We were open for three days and we had over 1,000 people come through. It really blew me away and demonstrated to me that parents all around the country are really looking for ways to introduce their children to STEM in ways that are fun and to make it a family experience. Now we are in New York for six weeks with a holiday themed SpecTECHular and then we will be touring 10 cities between now and the end of 2018.

Who is this pop-up for? Should kids who visit already have a passion for STEM? 
Definitely not. That was one of the things we wanted to learn from Chattanooga. We wanted to learn who would want to come to a space like this and the answer that we got from the test run was, everyone. I can’t tell you how many adults came without children and they would say that they were interested in learning about tech and this seemed like a really fun and approachable way to do it. We added a lot of virtual reality and robotics in the New York pop-up for teens and tweens. And for the first time we will be opening on Friday nights for ages 21 and older, so you can come have a cocktail and play with all of our tech games, too.

Do you have any tips for parents who want to introduce technology to their kid at home? 
I think right now a lot of parents feel torn about introducing tech to their children, because when they think about tech, they think about screen time and screens have a nasty little habit of coming between you and your family instead of bringing everyone together. So one thing I really wanted to do, because I am a mom of two young boys, I wanted to demonstrate that there are thousands of ways to introduce children to technology without ever gluing them to a screen, and we have 20 of those experiences at Sue’s Tech Kitchen. Everything here is designed to bring families together, to give ideas for fun activities, to create discussion points, and also anything you see here can be recreated. For example, the food drum [pictured above] where we’ve wired up apples so that you can play different holiday tunes, that is something that is super easy to create in your own kitchen and we are actually selling all the wires so that you can do it at home. I don’t want people to walk into Sue’s Tech Kitchen and feel like it’s all a mystery or that we aren’t going to tell you how any of this works. I want kids and families to fall in love with STEM in their own homes and keep that going for years.