By All Means

Chemist and professor Paul Boswell couldn’t get over how little his students knew about how computers work. He started building a three-dimensional model to teach programming and realized he could turn it into a game. Named for Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, Turing Tumble is basically a marble run that teaches people how to build computers—something no other game was doing at the time. Teachers and science nerds love it; kids of all ages will put down the screens to play with it. But perhaps even more impressive than creating a mechanical computer both educational and entertaining, is the grassroots approach Boswell and his wife Alyssaalso a former teacher and now CEO, took to turning Turing Tumble into a $4.5 million business in just four years. No angel investors, no big branding agency, no retail partner. Just a homemade video to tell their story and a Kickstarter campaign to shore up enough money for the initial manufacturing run. They needed $40,000. They raised $400,000. And now t