RoboLab

Belonging to the marginalized part of the population, many girls don't have access to robotics classes, aren't encouraged to study this area or are still victims of the gender prejudice in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Educational robotics makes girls agents of their own learning, helping them to develop a critical sense, to expand their logical reasoning, to identify opportunities for improvement and to socialize.

RoboLab is a mobile robotics laboratory that travels around the places to give workshops for girls from poor communities and/or who don't have access to robotics classes. With the help of monitors with didactic materials, the girls will learn functions as robots builder, programmer and organizer, as well as they'll improve the educational robotics skills. With the solution on a global scale, robotics classes could reach any community, without restriction of gender, age or language.

In Brazil, many schools don't have infrastructure to implement robotics laboratories. In 2018, according to the Industry News Portal, only 59% of public schools had a computer lab in conditions of use. In addition, many girls don't even have access to school, as pointed out by the National Household Sample Survey in 2015: 1 to 2% of girls aged 5-14 were out of school and it's 15% for the ones aged 15-17. 

Globally, the UNESCO points out that around 263 million people aged 6-17 were out of school in 2018. The UNICEF says that if solutions aren't adopted to reduce disparity of access to technology between people, it'll continue causing social exclusion. The access promotes improvement in the quality of education, attention of people in seeking solutions to problems and more professional options for them.

Many girls don't have access to technology because they're out of schools for several reasons, schools don't have funds to implement educational robotic or even because of the gender prejudice. It's necessary to reduce this disparity in order to promote greater equality of opportunities. Many skill areas are covered with educational robotics and barriers to access it can be overcome.

RoboLab is a mobile robotics laboratory to give classes in the format of workshops of this technology to girls from poor communities and/or who do not have access to educational robotics. It's consisted of a laboratory set up on trucks/buses that travels around the communities. 

Each workshop will last about two hours and it'll have four groups of four girls each. With the help of at least two monitors, the girls will perform functions as robot builders, programmers and organizers. In this process, the proposal is to use LEGO® Mindstorm® Education EV3 kits, as they are didactic materials that allow the person to understand the theory and practice it in just one class. 

The kits have magazines that contain the step by step of building and programming robots with with themes from our day-to-day or school (rocking chair, basketball launcher, solar system, etc.), which will make the discussion go beyond robotics. At the end of each workshop, a challenge from in the magazine in use will be launched, so the girls will have to use their creativity to adapt the robot that they had already built and programmed to solve the problem.

The target population are girls and young women aged 6 to 18 from communities in need and/or who don't have access to robotics classes. They're the people who are most likely to discredit their own skills and abilities to improve the world around them, because generally they have strength only for their own survival. These characteristics in people are empowered through educational robotics, which develops their skills and awakens their imagination to identify and solve problems.

To understand their needs, we created an online form, which was answered by 176 people covering 18 states in Brazil. The questions involved: education system (public or private), performance in the STEM areas, opinion regarding gender prejudice in the STEM areas, if the person has already taken a robotics class, if the school has infrastructure for robotics classes and if the person would take an experimental robotics class.

86.9% of the respondents believe that women suffer gender prejudice in STEM areas. Most of them (61.9%) never had a robotics class and the same percentage always studied in schools without robotics laboratories. 78.4% say they would take an educational robotics class. That is, people who already had contact with robotics classes would do it again.

The challenge seeks proposals that promote access to quality learning opportunities for marginalized girls and young women to succeed. The problem, solution and target audience studied are part of this theme, as it promotes the access of girls and young women aged 6-18 to robotics classes, in order to develop their skills (critical and creative sense, logical and mathematical reasoning, socialization, etc.). It's a new learning model, being workshops with small groups of girls for better monitoring of them and with access to marginalized communities, guaranteeing opportunities of experimental learning, breaking down the barriers involved in accessing technological education.

Analyzing the logic of the operation of educational robotics classes in Brazil and in the world, we realize that, currently, there are some fixed robotics laboratories, which are unable to reach many marginalized communities, being limited to the population that lives next to it. 

The main innovation of the project is to have a laboratory in a mobile unit, so it could be easily moved between communities, reaching a greater number of girls. As seen in many papers already developed by professionals, one single robotics class is enough to make a difference in people's skills and to change their perceptions about STEM areas. In addition, the demographic rates of girls out of school, even though there were already some fixed robotics laboratories, are high, setting up an opportunity to develop a project that reaches more people.

The main technology used in the solution is the LEGO® Mindstorms® Education EV3 kit, an educational robotics solution that promotes an innovative teaching and encourages learning in areas of knowledge such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 

The kit consists of: LEGO® building blocks, EV3 block (a programmable and compact computer that makes it possible to control motors and collect feedback from the sensors), engines, sensors (gyroscope, ultrasonic, of color and of touch), data logging and programming software available, packages (magazines) with projects ready for application with students, including problem solving activities with several possible solutions, in a context that makes learning fun and engaging and e-Learning for teachers with more than 100 lessons in tutorial videos.

Through it, girls will be able to build and to program robots and develop their critical sense, stimulate teamwork, favor curiosity and creativity and increase their interest in learning.

The scientist Seymourt Papert, graduated at the Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, was the great precursor of educational robotics in the 1960s, as he already realized that computers were a resource that attracted children and thereby facilitated the learning process.

The Undergraduate in Biomedical Engineering thesis by Erika Akemi Yanaguibashi Albuquerque, in 2018, in Brazil, made an analysis of the use of educational robotics as a tool for the prevention of mental disorders. From a questionnaire with 197 students aged 8-20, she saw that 71.4% of them believe that with educational robotics their thinking skills were more organized, about 76.4% believe that through mistakes it's possible to improve their projects and 57.5% believe they have improved their social living with colleagues. 

A paper by Elder dos Santos Teixeira, in 2018, and published in the Revista Eletrônica DECT, referred to educational robotics using the LEGO® Mindstorms® Education EV3 kit as a tool for teaching cinematics. Interviewing 26 students from 14 to 17 years old before they had robotics class, girls represented 23.08% of the ones who already liked physics. This number grows to 69.23% after the robotics class. All students said they enjoyed studying physics using robotics, 75% said they were motivated to study physics using robotics and 96.43% said that the robotic class improved learning.

Many studies show that educational robotics, especially with using the LEGO® Mindstorms® Education EV3 kit, improves people's learning in different areas of knowledge and improves their skills.

The main barrier is financial, mainly because the project depends on a truck to serve as a mobile unit, LEGO® Mindstorms® Education EV3 kits, computers, furniture and fund for the expenses of drivers and mentors. Technically, we need help in mentoring for future mentors, about education, learning and about building and programming LEGO® robots. We also need a register as a legal entity to start the project.

We seek contact with the right companies, institutions and people to help us with financial barriers and we believe that through Solve we can have greater visibility and more access to this group. We plan to seek partnerships with preparatory institutions or teachers of robotics to train mentors in the area of educational robotics, in addition to a partnership with a lawyer or accountant to proceed with the bureaucratic part of the project.

RoboLab team is made up of ex-students of educational robotics. One of the components, Igor, migrated from a private school to a public one, during high school. The first one has robotics classes and the second one doesn't have. So he could understand the difference that exists between people of his new school and the previous one. The other component, Kalyane, helped to start a robotics team to participate in the FIRST LEGO League robotics championships, allowing more students to have contact with robotics (one of these students was Igor).

Thus, we got to know the importance of robotics in education and the power it brings us to unlock the mind to solve problems around us and we realized how big is the inequality that exists in this area between those who have and who don't have access to robotics. We also realized the marjoritary participation of boys in robotics teams. So we created the RoboLab project to give the same opportunity that we had to girls from underprivileged communities, to help to reduce this disparity.

We have contacts with professionals from the Federation of Industries of the State of Bahia System, which is the representative of the National Confederation of Industry in our state, due to the visibility that our robotics team has gained and for us to have studied in schools of the Social Service of Industry. We also have contacts with instructors of robotics and Kalyane is a logistics technician, with experience in project and production management.

Directly, the service provided of a free educational robotics workshop for girls aged 6-18 from communities in need and/or without access to educational robotics. Our main clients will be socially conscious individuals, educational institutions and municipal and state governments in countries, as it's from their donations that the project will work. The benefits for these clients are the reduction in school dropout rates for girls, people trained to act as monitors for robotics (job creation) and the possibility of increasing the number of women taking courses in the STEM areas.

The service provided is a 2-hour workshop for groups of 16 girls and a mobile robotics laboratory, with the assistance of a monitor for programming and executing a robot with LEGO® Mindstorms® Education EV3 materials kit. Thus, our beneficiaries are girls aged 6-18 years from communities in need and/or without access to educational robotics. With the project, they gain skills and experience in the area of technology and robotics, as well as develop skills and improve critical thinking to solve problems in their communities.

We are signing up for Solve in order to bring greater visibility to the project. MIT's nine-month program will give us the opportunity to make global connections with people interested in the project, as well as companies and potential investors. In addition, the support of experts, mainly focused on the barriers we are facing, will help us to seek smarter ways to solve them, as well as create strategies to achieve our goals effectively. The awards would help us to invest in part of the resources necessary for the progress of the project, bringing us closer to making it a pilot.

We need partnerships to get the materials needed to start distributing our service on a pilot project. In addition, we need to map the first potential communities and how the entire process will take place in them. We need mentoring for the funding model, in order to be able to detail all project expenditures and how much funding we need. In addition, we also need mentoring to think of a way to generate revenue, in a way that the project will become self-sustainable in a few years. We also need mentoring in recruiting talent, to understand the ideal profiles to work with education, with children and that is available to migrate from communities for a period. In addition, we seek partnerships to train these people. Finally, another urgent topic that we need help with is legal and regulatory matters for using a truck and staying on communities.

Vehicle company or dealership to lend a truck to function as a mobile unit; fuel distributors to supply the mobile unit; LEGO® or schools that have the LEGO® Mindstorms® Education EV3 kits for the supply of the kits; National Confederation of Industry (CNI) or institutions that have educational robotics for the training of monitors; interior design or architects to readjust the project regarding technical standards; stationery to supply office supplies; and entrepreneurs who want to contribute with the payment of monitors and drivers and the maintenance of the project.

Since the project aims to meet the needs for skill development through educational robotics mainly for marginalized girls, refugee children are also covered by this project. It will be a means of including refugee girls in this the robotics and STEM areas in a project that goes to them, to their camps. It will promote their integration, as well as help them to overcome challenges with the skills developed. The UN Refugee Agency points out that ensuring that refugee girls have access to education is crucial for their empowerment and for the prosperity of their families and communities, which are characteristics seen in girls who have access to educational robotics.

The project aims to improve the lives of girls and young women, giving them the possibility to break the barriers of the gender prejudice, develop different skills and increase their confidence in themselves. The project aims to use technology to show women in practice that the world of technology is also theirs.

The project aims to  offer girls and young women experimental robotics classes wherever they are located. It'll be a great opportunity to them to develop skills and learn new things. In addition, it would be a great incentive to receive the award from General Motors, since the solution consists of a mobile robotics laboratory mounted on trucks/buses, so it would be very important to have contact with engineers at the company's headquarters, to understand the challenges and opportunities for the operation of classes in a mobile vehicle.