Thinking about core values as an Ed Tech start up

Thank you to Jog Ltd for running their workshop on brand identity at Google Campus today. Robert Smith and Hetti Cheung kindly gave us their time and considerable expertise to get start ups thinking about unspoken branding. 

Their work with several major brands highlighted the importance of identifying our core values and attempting to pinpoint a singular idea that reflects our project. I found the singular idea very easy, learning. MadeByEducators only came about as we saw a need to use the power of mobile / haptic devices to support self paced personalised learning, particularly for students with non typical learning styles.

Putting this singular idea into a non-verbal form was much, much harder, I previously posted on our logo dilemma which is still not settled. 'Proxemics', was also tricky as we are an app development company working out of my kitchen so no 'space',to style! Although we will take up the idea of a board or space which we can use to keep focused on why we are doing this in the first place.

Haptics were really my kind of challenge and got me thinking about how Pocket Playground reflects our core values better than any of our apps so far. You can 'play', with it making music, moving toys, tipping, building, you can even shout at it to make the sails on the windmill turn so its really tuning in to a variety of communication styles while attempting to be 'language', free. 
We should really use elements of Pocket playground in our logo.

We also had group activities around considering the narrative of our companies, and incorporating our stories into our 'branding'. The story of MadeByEducators is largely one of necessity as traditional learning may well fail my child with special educational needs. Our story is also about a passion for allowing all children to access learning and embracing change,... not sure how to brand that.

The workshop also got me thinking about what a logo really is in this modern iOS7 sensory landscape. Could a logo be more haptic, more interactive, could it be embedded into our apps as an interactive feature? 
Hummm... pocket playground is not released yet so still time!