Kidbotics: Robotics Club for all.

Kidbotics looks forward to eradicating existing inequities around the world, through the accomplishment of goal number 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals: Quality Education. Specifically, this goal urges to substantially increase the number of youth who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs, and entrepreneurship by 2030.  

Additionally, in 10 years from now, young people who lack programming and problem solving through robotics skills will become digital illiterates; We are currently immersed in a digital era that progresses more and more and has no return. Therefore, the educational system needs to make adjustments (such as the incorporation of programming and robotics as essential skills to acquire) so that disadvantaged youth learn the skills they need to prepare them for the workforce of the future and thrive in the 21st century.

Kidbotics offers adaptive learning programs to teach robotics and programming to boys and girls all around Mexico and the world at the lowest cost by connecting people who know programming and robotics (students, teachers, etc.) with children starting at 5 years old.

Through a mix of free and low-cost platforms (google meet, zoom, tinkercad, scratch, code.org, Arduino, etc.) that allow the interaction and exact mixing of the Physical and the Digital (Phygital), Kidbotics is present in over 5 Mexican States with three modalities:

1. Afternoon or Saturday kidbotics club inside schools with physical professors presences 
2. At home with google meet or zoom club with free simulators and the optional physical components
3. Afternoon or Saturday Phygital Kidbotics Club, where students can be at the school with online professors. 

These courses are given through laboratories that can be virtual devices at no cost or adaptable and scalable for each institution. In addition, Kidbotics uses recycled materials, universal and free programming circuits.

For a 10 students group, the hour cost is only $2 USD (for each student) and professors can get an $8 USD for an hour, making a competitive payment in Mexico, Latin America, and developing countries for undergraduate university students (and even for professionals).

Our target populations are children starting from 5 to 18 years old. At least in Mexico and in many other Latin American countries, there is a huge gap between public and private education in elementary or high school. The obsolete and basic technology classes inside the elementary and high school are dividing the opportunities, jobs, and wellbeing.

On the other hand, schools don’t have the time to do this kind of program, they have a basic syllabus to work with, and old school professors don’t want to change or improve their classes.

In Kidbotics, we want to bring together people who know programming, robotics and want to earn extra money teaching children with curiosity, guided with a fail-fast methodology, where students play, develop, fail, learn and improve.  

We already have 2 years of reaching child curiosity, inside the school, outside school, in a physical, digital, or phygital way.

Our team believes that the best way to deliver equal opportunities for all is through education. We are multidisciplinary professors and students mainly from Tecnologico de Monterrey University (in Mexico), who are passionate about education and skills development. We believe that working with kids from 5 years old to 18 years old in the programming and robotics field, they will have a better life and job opportunities no matter the diploma they can get (if they can) after high school.

Our knowledge is in programming, robotics, business, and entrepreneurship, and our experience in education is more than 15 years.

We started the club three years ago in an elementary school facility, having kids from different schools, empowering them by choosing different topics, giving them free and open-source tools, relaying in the confidence that it is “OK” to fail, learn and try it again.

We, as a team, learned that every single child has his or her own time to explore, engage, learn, and do, so what we did, was to develop an adaptative program, where kids can jump from one level to another based on their skills, maturity, and attitude and not by their age.

After a little more than a year, we started negotiations with another school around the San Luis Potosí City to start new Kidbotics Clubs, but the COVID 19 closed all the schools and our expansion dreams too. Three months later parents start to ask us to start online classes and in April 2020 we launched our online kidbotics club 2 months later we started to have children from all around Mexico.

With the online club, we learn how to do community online, how to work digitally and Phygitally and we started to work with professors in other countries.

Right now, we started on February 2022 the physical club again (and the digital still working), but as the school facilities were still restricted due to the sanitary policies, we started to teach other places different from a school, so now we know that Kidbotics Club can be everywhere, even at home.

This project started in January 2019 with the vision of replicating this robotic club as fast and far away as we can, we know that every single community we can reach, is a better future for those kids who can get involved in the project. 

 We are pursuing 2 important things with the SOLVE Challenge:

1) The international recognition of the challenge can help us to convince more communities and schools to get a kidbotics club for their children.

 2) The SOLVE challenge can inject economic fuel into our project to achieve the goals we have in the next 3 years:

a) Consolidating the foundations of spreading robotics clubs all around Mexico.

b) Creating an ONG that rise the funds necessary to reach the rural and marginal communities.

We are different from any other robotic school because our goal is to reach the lowest cost of teaching programming and robotics. We even have reduced the price by 10% in the last three years by introducing free educational tools, open-source software, and different electronic components from all around the world. We also hire programming and robotics students and even professionals who want to earn an extra income and empower them by deploying a fast-fail model that engages children's curiosity and replicates different challenges (ready to teach) with a step-by-step class (https://view.genial.ly/6133a08...).

 We are different because we maximize the resources and reduce costs to develop different skills:

1. Solving problems
2. Programming
3. Electronics
4. Teamwork
5. To achieve a sustainable programming and robotics community

Next year we will reach 20 communities, schools, and the online community with 20 students club each one, giving us a total of 400 students. 

We will hire 1 technical support person (January 2022), to start looking for more communities, schools, and students, as well as instructors who want to become part of the team and earn an extra income.

 We also will hire 1 relationship manager that contacts different communities’ leaders, schools, and companies to become a kidbotics sponsorship to provide the space or resources to start a club.

 And finally, we will hire a course and educational resource designer who will maintain the lessons, files, videos, and other resources together and available.

In our second year, we will consolidate an ONG that helps kidbotics to fundraise capital to sponsor marginal communities and schools with the $2 USD an hour per student program.

In our fifth year, we want to reach 200 communities and schools, becoming a 4,000 robotics member club.

 It seems not easy, and it won’t, but with the right people, actions,  resources, and help we are sure we can do it.

In the UN 17 goals, we are working closely for the 8th “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”, with an emphasis on decent work for all. Thus, we can see our set of indicators:

1)    Number of students that reach the programming and robotics competencies in levels A, B, and C.

2)    Number of clubs that works on their own

It will be hard to follow every single student in the job opportunities, but if they get the competence, they will have a better job opportunity.

Another secondary indicator is the number of communities, schools, people, we can help every year.

The bureaucracy in the educational programs, the old syllabus, the old school professors, and the economic limitations that 90% of the institutions face (at least in Mexico and Latin America), could be balanced by societal effort.

 If we bring together engineering students and professionals who want an extra income by teaching programming and robotics for children from 5 to 18 years old with curiosity, we can empower and prepare those kids with competencies that year by year are becoming very important for many jobs around the world.

Kidbotics is not an enterprise that wants to make money by providing lessons, professors, and robotic products. We want to empower kids and youth to make a robotic club sustainable over time.

Our goal is to teach how to make a robotic club in every single community and school, and if those clubs won’t need our help in 3 or 4 years after starting with them, we would have accomplished our mission.

The main technology we use is the internet, we can work with many devices but the software we use is online:

https://www.tinkercad.com/  

https://code.org/  

https://scratch-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org 

https://www.arduino.cc/ 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode 

https://miro.com/  

https://genial.ly/

https://zoom.us/ 

Google for education

Our team is very small right now, but we encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion as a base of our success.

Our customers are parents, and the users are kids.

 For parents, we provide better future opportunities to their kids by learning programming and robotics. The automation of tasks is taking human jobs, and the new job openings will need different skills than those that are provided by many schools.

 For kids, we are offering an active, funny, and hands-on way to learn, with no limits of physical or digital modality.

 Our partners are communities and schools, we need them as the trigger of the robotic club, as well as the meeting place. The classes are brought online, physically and Phygitally.

 Right now, parents are paying the instruction, but with the consolidation of Kidbotics’ ONG, we will fundraise hours from companies for those communities in marginal situations betting for children that can become future employees with better jobs and conditions.

For parents that can afford the class, the cost is $16 USD a month (8 hours), which means $2USD for each hour.

The payment of the instructor is starting at $8 USD/ hour, which means $64 USD a month for one group (this is a standardized preview, you can add hours to the program)

With a starting group of 5 kids, we have an 80 USD revenue per month.

With an 8 kids group, we earn $64 USD per month after cost, and with a maximum of 10 kids per group, we earn $96 USD per month.

For students or professionals who want to earn an extra income, by teaching 4 groups, which means 8 hours per week, they are earning $256 USD a month, this is $46 USD higher than the full-time minimum salary in Mexico.

 For kids living in marginal situations, the Kidbotics ONG will work to connect companies, people, or other organizations who want to support their scholarships (2022 / 2023 project).

We haven't started to raise funds yet.

The revenue we generated last year in the pandemic was around 10,000 USD.