Since 2012, Two Bit Circus, a group of entertainment engineers, has been playing around with robots, lasers and fire, creating quirky, exciting, interactive experiences for wide-eyed audience and co-founders Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman have been steadily challenging the assumption that science and engineering are boring.

We talk to Bushnell to find out more about the Los Angeles-based collective.

How did Two Bit Circus come about?
I met Eric about seven years ago. We were both STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] guys. He was building robots for the military and I was making video games, but we both wanted to be playing with other tech. The first night we met in person we stayed up until 4am building things. We began to find other people in LA who got similar enjoyment out of fabrication and all that stuff, so we formed a little band of nerds.

You don’t seem like nerds in the way you present and engage with audiences. Has the world got nerds wrong?
One of the opportunities we have at the moment is to rebrand what it is to be a nerd. There’s a negative cultural narrative around the sciences and maths. There’s a traditional thinking that engineering is all pencil ties and lab coats, but that’s all wrong: there are lasers and fires and robots and all sorts of neat things which make engineering, maths and science really exciting. People who fit the role of engineer are still playful and fun.

You want to inspire a future generation of inventors, so who inspired and continues to inspire you?
On many levels, Eric and I inspire each other. My dad was a big inspiration and it’s fun to be back around my family as a peer. [Bushnell’s father is entrepreneur and engineer Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and other video game companies].

I read an interesting study which underscored the fact that there’s no shortage of hard problems to work on, and that’s where the genesis of inspiring inventors came from: how could us nerds inspire an army of inventors and what impact could they have on the world?

You and Eric shared a vision of making STEM fun, but how easy was it to find a way of bringing that idea to fruition?
It extended from our core team pretty naturally. Leading up to the creation of Two Bit Circus, we were always playing with technology. We didn’t have a business model in the beginning. We were just playing with stuff and taking it to parties. We did fundraisers and parties for companies like Amazon and Intel, with up to 10,000 guests.

Then we made a music video for the band Ok Go’s single This Too Shall Pass. We built a huge Rube Goldberg Machine in a warehouse and the video went viral with 45 million views. Loads of parents and teachers called us to say the kids loved it.

We ended up also being on-camera inventors for a home makeover TV show, ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, building a new invention for each house.

We were having a lot of fun with engineering and we were going into schools to talk about it. Statistics show America is ranked 47th in maths across the world, but we saw kids getting excited about this stuff, which made us think about how we could take this show on the road. That’s how STEAM Carnival came about, it’s our biggest undertaking to date.

What does STEAM carnival involve?
We want the focus of STEAM Carnival to be to convert non-STEM kids into STEM kids. We decided to do that by putting art into the mix, turning STEM into STEAM. Adding art – fashion, music, games – was a pretty powerful shift: those things appeal to most kids.

The STEAM Carnival involves a lead-up element at school, where kids learn about design, creation, programming and fabrication. This culminates in a live event at the show. The children create a fashion show of wearable electronics, a battle of the bands for musical robots and an arcade made of indie-group games.

It’s aimed at 11 to 14-year-olds, as this is the age they often opt out. We’re aiming to create a curriculum for under-12s as well.

Was it easy to get schools on board?
Our Kickstarter campaign received a lot of media and internet coverage which enabled us to trial the concept. From that we had teachers and schools call us.

Do you have plans to take the STEAM Carnival overseas?
Yes, it’s just a question of timing. We’re in talks with a group in Poland and also in China, as well as about 10 other cities around the US to take it on the road.

Could this be adapted for an attraction?
We would love to do that. We’ve talked about modifying it to become a touring museum exhibit and spoken with science museums about what it could look like.

We’ve got all the games we’ve been making: one of the original ideas with the carnival was we’d test and trial ideas under our own control and then sell them to theme and amusement parks.

Can you tell us about any new projects you have on the go?
We’ve been working on virtual reality and filming in 360, and we’re looking at mixing that with a story adventure.

Is there ever anything you want to do, but can’t make happen?
We have to consider safety and the size of things, making sure they’re portable, but we try not to put the brakes on too early. However, I do wish we had more time.