I'm T. T. Spriggs, the creator of The Mixed‑Up Robot, but most people just call me T.

I'm a passionate father of 7 amazing children, who is teaching himself how to write and design books and activities for young readers. I am also building a mobile companion app and this fully-staged website, one step at a time. I envision a whole "Mixed-Up World" that bridges learning, fun, and our ever-advancing, technology-driven culture into one unique experience.

I was inspired by many children's book authors who have come before me, and the impact that their creativity and characters had on reading to and raising my own children. Years in the rhythm of "one more page" taught me how much closer kids pay attention when they're the ones allowed to notice something themselves, and that's exactly where The Mixed-Up Robot was born. My mother's more than two decades in education, paired with her master's degree in English, lend real credibility to the learning at the heart of this project, from the books to the activities and curriculum still ahead.

None of these robots are invented from nothing, they're my kids. My daughter is Mixed-Up: she'll play confused before she'll admit she already knows the answer, and the lesson I'm still teaching her is that it's fine not to know something, and just as fine to be sure of yourself when you do. My son is Fixed-Up down to the bone, you cannot tell that boy anything without him deciding he already knew it first, so watching him learn to take a correction and still feel proud of himself became the whole point of the character. Then there's my youngest, a small storm of feelings who hadn't found many words yet when this all started, which meant his brother and sister had to get good at reading him before he could tell them what was wrong. That's Gr3gg. My kids know it, too, and if parents reading this recognize their own child in one of these three, that's not a coincidence. That's the whole reason they exist.

This is a world built for real families: wiggly hands, bent pages, laughter that lands in the wrong spot and makes it better anyway. It's built for curiosity, for pride, and for the small stuff, sitting close, pointing at a picture, celebrating getting it "right," one giggle at a time.