Letting Children Build our Smart Communities, with Jonathan Reichental and Brett Hoffstadt

Hi #smartcommunity friends! In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast I had the pleasure of speaking with both Jonathan Reichental and Brett Hoffstadt, the co-authors of their new book, Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids. Jonathan is currently the founder of advisory, investment, and education firm, Human Future, and also creates online education for LinkedIn Learning. He has written two books on the future of cities: Smart Cities for Dummies and of course Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids. Brett Hoffstadt has a unique fusion of a technical and creative background with achievements in aeronautical engineering, project management, corporate innovation initiatives, and music composing. We talk about Brett and Jonathan's backgrounds in aerospace engineering and tech respectively, Brett's passion for encouraging people into STEM careers, Jonathan's passion for Smart Cities and how the two came to meet to co-author their book. Brett and Jonathan tell us what a Smart Community is to them, we discuss the importance of big and bold ideas in the Smart Communities space and how important children are to contribute to driving change in this space. Brett and Jonathan then give us an overview of their book and how children can benefit from it, before sharing some narratives from the book. We then discuss the importance of creating 'active citizens' at an early age by teaching children about cities and communities, how they can contribute to making communities smart and how teachers may benefit from their book as a resource to teach their students. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of the use of drones and self-driving cars in our communities and more transparency around product and service development in cities. As always, we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it! Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community Connect with Brett via LinkedIn or Twitter Connect with Jonathan via LinkedIn or Twitter Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital