About

The Story Behind the Sparks

Chris Kuczynski has been building things since he was twelve. He earned his engineering degree from the University of Washington and spent the next twelve years as a working engineer before a new question took hold: how do you protect an idea so the world can benefit from it? That question led him to patent law, where he has spent over two decades helping inventors turn ideas into protected, world changing creations.

In 2015, Chris cofounded a preschool, and something clicked. He watched toddlers do the exact same things his inventors did. They observed. They sketched (in crayon). They built, failed, rebuilt, and celebrated. The only difference was that nobody had told them what to call it yet.

Kit's Little Sparks is the result of those two worlds colliding. The series builds in children ages two to four the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset, along with first ideas from the world of intellectual property, through play based storytelling. Each book introduces a new friend, a new challenge, and a new concept drawn directly from the patent process, all wrapped in watercolor illustrations and language designed for the smallest minds with the biggest ideas.

"As a patent attorney, I have worked with hundreds of inventors. The one trait they all share is not genius. It is curiosity. They look at the ordinary world and see what everyone else walks past. I wrote Kit's Little Sparks to plant that seed as early as possible, because the best time to build an inventor's mindset is before a child even knows what an inventor is."

About Chris Kuczynski

Chris Kuczynski is an engineer turned registered patent attorney, a preschool co-founder, a dad, and the author of Kit's Little Sparks, a 20-book STEM series that gives children ages 2 to 4 the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset: curiosity, problem solving, and the first idea behind intellectual property, that credit belongs to the person who made the thing. Kit's Little Sparks is the first of four age-tiered series he is writing for young readers, ages 2 to 12. Reach him at inventor@littlesparksbooks.com.