Robotics Without Limits

Providing unique robotics learning opportunities for children with special needs and equipping educators with our learning-by-doing program and curriculum.

Problem:

Approximately 10 percent of all children have some type of learning disability, which inhibits their potential to succeed and master concepts in a typical classroom environment. Rigorous mathematics and purely theoretical discussions can be very strenuous on the mind and cause difficulties for children, especially those with special needs, attempting to learn important concepts.

Solution:

My name is Kaushik, and I’m a 16-year-old entering my senior year of high school. I created this organization because I strongly believe that unconventional learning styles require unconventional teaching methodologies. At the core of our solution is the tangibilization of results. By using hands-on robotics workshops and by providing our curriculum and kits to educators, we enable children with special needs to solve challenges by using logic to build, program, and control robots. Robotics appeals to children with learning disabilities as it allows them to explore concepts like applied physics and logical reasoning in a learning-by-doing framework.

At our workshops, we use the Ziro robotics kits, which are aimed towards making robotics accessible and fun by lowering barriers to entry. In our pilot programs, we find that hands-on learning through robotics provides a unique avenue for children with learning disabilities to grow by expressing their creativity, quickly learning technical skills, and viewing their creations perform various tasks. While in a computer science class, these children might make a game where a character is required to navigate a maze, but in a robotics session, they can build and program a physical robot to complete an actual maze. Thus, they tangibly interact with the results of their work, which gives them a great sense of satisfaction and further kindles their curiosity.

Impact so far:

We have conducted 12 sessions for a total of approximately 40 children with special needs. These students and their parents have had a very positive experience with our workshops, which enabled their children to collaboratively think about and solve challenges.

We collected data from the participants about their experiences before and during our workshops. The following graph shows that programming and electronics are the most significant challenges faced by children with special needs interested in robotics.

The Ziro robotics kit lowers these barriers by pushing coding and electronics to the background and bringing forward a child's creativity. Our workshop leverages Ziro’s accessibility and ease of use to enable children to have fun and remain engaged while building sophisticated robots (the graph below).

Long-term impact:

Our pilot programs have been extremely successful, and we would like to continue holding workshops while distributing our curriculum to various educators of children with learning disabilities. Over the next several years, we wish to broaden the scope of our offerings in order to increase each student’s understanding of and affinity towards engineering, while simultaneously reaching out to and impacting more individuals. Our solution helps to enable the next tens of millions of participants in the technological world, where all students will have a bright future to look forward to.

Robotics Without Limits uses ZeroUI’s innovative technology to design robotics sessions that bring unique learning opportunities to children with special needs. This partnership, where a company’s product meshes with the goals of a non-profit, is thus very beneficial to the community. Furthermore, one of our advisors, Paulette, runs an inclusion program at Google and oftentimes visits our workshops. Parents network with her to find out about career opportunities for people on the autism spectrum. Therefore, our workshops also offer a rare chance for parents to discover the long-term possibilities for their children.

Robotics traditionally requires very high amounts of cognitive effort. For children with special needs to be able to partake in this activity, it is critical that an innovation changes the way people learn robotics. The Ziro robotics kit is that technological innovation. Our workshops provide the link between those who would benefit from this technology and the technology itself. Elements such as gestures (glove), Blockly programming, a vision sensor, and voice commands provide critical exposure in the technological arena to children with special needs.

• Expand to more places within the San Francisco Bay Area through partnerships with other educators and organizations, several of which have approached us and we are already in the process of initiating collaborations with.

  • Student with special needs + sibling “buddy” workshops (currently in partnership with California Sibling Leadership Network)

  • Stanbridge Academy, San Mateo, CA (we have educators from this academy for special needs students involved)

• Diversify the curriculum and robots (which we will continue to use in our workshops) in order to increase the number of concepts that the students learn during the sessions.

• Expand across the U.S. to approximately 10 different states through further collaboration with educators, building upon our 12 month goal.

• Create different types of sessions (and the accompanying curriculum)

  • 1 or 2 hour Workshops

  • Full-day Workshops/Camp

  • Semester-long Weekend classes

• Provide different offerings for children who are on various places of the functioning spectrum

• Obtain resources/funding from private/federal organizations that will help us expand, by applying to NSF, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others.

Reaching out:

• Contacting Bay Area Special Needs support groups to gain participants for workshops.

• Collaborating with educators will bring Robotics Without Limits to more students.

• Participating in events (eg: SF Access to Adventure Festival) to find potential collaborators/educators/participants.

Retaining participants:

• Creating new curriculum so that former participants can return and have new and more challenging experiences.

• Bringing in more experts for parents to network with at the workshops.

Retaining educators:

• Conducting yearly teacher training sessions (teaching them how to most effectively use our kits with our curriculum)

• Conferences for educators (to develop a tightly-knit community of instructors)

Approximately 50 children with special needs have participated in/are signed up for our workshops, and that number continues to grow as we host more and more sessions. Each child has gained a unique exposure to the latest technologies by building, programming, and playing with smart interaction robots provided by ZeroUI, and can now relate new real-world experiences back to what they learned at the workshop. We are also collaborating with educators like those at Stanbridge Academy (San Mateo, CA), to help them incorporate our program into their school curriculum for the 2018-19 school year, to reach even more students.

12 months

• Reach 100 new children in 12 months through targeted promotions to groups and collaboration with educators at special needs schools.

• Retain former participants by advancing curriculum.

• We believe that the diverse exposure that robotics provides will encourage these students to participate in various activities, starting with:

  • Enrolling in school robotics teams

  • Taking programming classes

3 years

• Our goal is to have 1,000 students in our population, by collaborating with special needs educators.

• Our workshops will then encourage special needs children to engage with:

  • Hackathons and Programming Competitions

  • Google Summer of Code

  • VEX Robotics and FIRST Robotics Competitions

Our team has a diverse set of experiences that help us provide high-quality robotics offerings to children with special needs.

• Kaushik Shivakumar, Founder

  • 7-year Competitive VEX Roboticist

  • 1 year — teaching Scratch to children with special needs

  • 2 years — taught programming in Bay Area libraries and organized All-Girls robotics workshops

• ZeroUI Team

  • Raja Jasti (CEO of ZeroUI)

    • Serial Entrepreneur with multiple products in the market

  • Ansh Verma, Dio Nazetta, Tanuj Siddharth

    • Creators of Ziro

    • Combined Experience

      • 7+ publications in the field of education technology and human robotics interaction.

      • 2+ years of experience in conducting workshops for children with special needs.

Currently, our workshop offerings are free, but in the future, we plan to charge small amounts for the workshops only to pay for administrative costs, such as for the website, promotions, and uniforms for the volunteers. Our revenue will come from these participation fees and funding from private and federal organizations. So far, we have only operated in a few cities, but children with special needs all across the world would benefit from Robotics Without Limits. Since we offer a solution to an unmet need, we foresee a huge demand for our offerings, which will fuel our sustainability and expansion.

Solve has the potential to help us reach more people in a variety of ways, including networking with the rich educational community at MIT (such as Mitchel Resnick). We could employ MIT undergraduates for events in the Boston-Cambridge area to connect skilled MIT students to children with special needs in order to expose them to STEM fields.

Events like Solve bring together key people that desire to change the world. Networking and partnering with them would help us spread our effort to more and more people. Additionally, any funding would greatly facilitate us in reaching our expansion goals.

• Key barriers include finding enough manpower, reaching the right partners, and securing enough funding to reach our expansion goals and run workshops in other localities.

• We also need to develop a more sustainable and efficient way of spreading the word about our offerings, compared to individually targeting support groups.

• Solve can help us reach out to partners and advertise to potential participants in the special needs community, so that we can reach our expansion goals.

• Partnerships that we obtain from the MIT Solve community could also help us address more niche special needs demographics (eg: different places on the spectrum).