Soft Robotics for Malleable Minds

Our solution aims to address the two first focus areas for the Gender Equity in STEM Challenge: supporting educators to effectively teach STEM topics to girls, and to ensure continuity across STEM education for girls to decrease successive drop-off rates. Despite significant advancement in the rights, opportunities and participation by women and underrepresented groups in the United States, there still exist stark gender and representation failures in many sectors of the US economy. Women are outnumbered by men in many STEM fields, especially computer science and engineering (19.9% and 27.1% respectively, as reported by ASEE By the Numbers, 2021). In middle school, twice as many boys intend to enter STEM fields as girls. Looking at college graduation rates in 2019, despite women now making up almost 60% of college graduates, they still only represent about 37% of STEM degree recipients. In looking at specific institutions (Yale), the presence of women belonging to underrepresented minority groups (specifically black, indigenous, and women of color) are far lower, with percentages of 2.2% for black women, 4.8% for hispanic/latinx women, and 0% hawaiian/pacific islander women (NSF NCSES, 2019). Many other manifestations of these disparities exist, and the issue is pervasive across all institutions of learning. The impact of this lack of gender equity manifests as the absence of diverse perspectives, approaches to problem-solving, applications of engineering technologies, and opportunity for individuals from underrepresented groups. Jobs, technology, and solutions to the problems that face society are often created by the contributions of STEM experts, and if those experts fail to adequately represent the true diversity of our society, their creations often fail to encompass the needs of everyone. Greater diversity in STEM fields will only serve to uplift women and minorities. 

The problem we are trying to solve is how to engage girls and children from other underrepresented groups within STEM education topics in Middle School and maintain their interest, at a time when diverging interests shape career choices far into the future. Partly because of the lack of diversity in STEM educational materials, current offerings for STEM education have been slow to adopt modern strategies to engage these underrepresented communities. Many past efforts for engagement have been to take materials that appeal to boys, and to make them “pink” or “girlish.” This marketing trend is present across the entire spectrum of products, where traditional products for men are marketed to women by merely tweaking an aesthetic element and changing the label. This inadequate approach can be perceived as insulting and drive away individuals who find such marketing to be patronizing. The problem cannot be solved by treating girls simply as boys with different aesthetic tastes; it demands the creation of educational materials and opportunities for learning that engage all groups equally. Robotics experiences in middle school are largely competition-based, and appeal to boys’ learning styles (task-oriented and line-following for example). As a result, children with differing learning styles are less likely to engage and pursue such topics in the future.

Our solution is a product line of high-quality STEM Education Kits with accompanying curriculum focusing on soft robotics. Each kit incorporates a different key aspect of soft robotics technology, such as bioinspiration, medical devices, textiles and other soft materials, and more. These subject areas have greater STEM engagement for women at large, with women participating in even greater numbers than men in specific science subject areas such as biology and textiles research (Science, Understanding persistent gender gaps in STEM, 2020). For subdisciplines like Environmental and Biomedical engineering, women represent 57.8% and 51.5% of bachelor's degree recipients (ASEE By the Numbers, 2021). Gender disparities persist within specific subdisciplines of STEM such as physics, engineering, and computer science (PECS) degrees. By bridging these subdisciplines of STEM, and engaging girls in middle school and high school with the uniquely interdisciplinary nature of soft robotics, Malleo, Inc. has the potential to further reduce these domain-specific disparities. In leveraging the elements of more popular fields of study and bringing them into the domains with lingering gender disparities, we aim to increase participation in the PECS fields and maintain high interest in the more broad STEM spaces. These kits will inspire interest in the broader ways in which all STEM disciplines involve topics that are more appealing to female and minority group audiences. All STEM kits will provide valuable curriculum in each kit that not only provides quality, hands-on learning experiences about soft robotics and STEM topics, and provides meaningful, diverse and inclusive language and infographics that help the participants see a variety of peoples and genders represented in the materials around the soft robots themselves. Our unique STEM kits approach robotics education differently than traditional learning materials, and appeal to different learning styles with human-centric designs and a wide range of experiences.

For example, one of our most developed and tested kits is our Gripper Kit. Contained within are several basic elements for fabricating a soft robotic gripper claw device, and then controlling and actuating it with an embedded motor and electronics board. Starting with the core elements of two-part platinum cure silicone, a student will follow the instructions to mix, cast, cure and demold these soft, flexible grippers. They would assemble these actuators into the two-finger gripper and perform a variety of manual experiments with the claw to fully understand the underlying mechanics of the system. Then, they would assemble the electronics and housing of the base, so they can then control the gripper system with a simple button press. At the end, the finished device can be used to perform a variety of tasks such as cup-stacking to compare with rigid gripper strategies. By the end of the process, the student has gained an understanding of polymer chemistry, bioinspired actuators, robotic manipulation, electronics, and motors. This learning experience will introduce many students to these STEM topics and create momentum and interest for future learning.

Primarily, our STEM Educational Kits aim to serve the population of middle school and early high school students in the United States; more specifically, young girls and underrepresented minority students who are otherwise underserved in providing engaging STEM education opportunities that help maintain momentum in STEM fields leading into higher education. Parents and educators of these children are also served by being able to provide quality education experiences with low-cost to participate and lowered barriers to entry with understandable curriculum materials. By designing these kit experiences with deliberate attention to diversity and inclusion, both the educational STEM soft robotics content and the delivery of the curriculum itself will engage and retain the interest of women and minorities in the key stages of academic differentiation. Research has shown the importance of quality interventions that promote STEM in providing young people with opportunities to visualize themselves in the roles of scientists and engineers. By increasing the amount that girls and underrepresented students associate their identity with STEM topics, there is an increase in participation and retention as they are drawn towards these fields (Lin, HUG Initiative: Overcoming roadblocks on a research career roadmap of individuals from historically marginalized or underrepresented genders, 2023). Furthermore, the educators and parents who administer these experiences experience an increase in their knowledge and belief in their own capacity to educate these children on topics like STEM, especially if they traditionally lack the formal training to teach these topics. Our soft robotic STEM Kits will create these impacts as they are distributed and engaged with within educational settings.

To better understand the needs of these populations, we have already performed over a hundred interviews with parents and educators from all backgrounds to understand their preferences, budgets, and opportunities for learning. As we develop our curriculum, we continue to leverage the education and communication expertise of our founders, as well as the direct feedback from our trial studies with students and teacher input on the ease of use and where there is room for improvement. We are seeking strategic partnerships with institutions dedicated to learning and inclusion such as the Boston Museum of Science, who has previously interacted with the project topically through its presence in the BioDesign Lab. We are also in talks with local educators in the Boston public school system, who operate at the intersection of class, race, and gender about their strategies to reach and empower students. We are specifically seeking diverse educators for their unique and essential input into the distinct needs for each of these different communities, to better reach and empower them with the learning materials that capture their interest. Once these vital perspectives have been collected, we aim to test our STEM kits both in museums, summer camps, and school classrooms to evaluate the impact on girls and minority students, and assess how well we incorporated the insights of educators.

Our team lead, Nicholas, grew up in small-town Missouri. His experiences as a white cis-man in predominantly conservative and white communities led him towards an interest in robotics and engineering from an early age. Nicholas went to the University of Missouri, Columbia for his undergraduate degree, and it was there that he had a series of tremendously valuable experiences that taught him the necessity of diversity and inclusion in all aspects of life. Many of his friends and peers were directly affected by the protests in Ferguson, MO following the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. The black student-led protests in 2015 further opened his eyes to the persisting inequalities present at all levels of our society. During his extracurricular pursuits, the voices of women and other minorities in engineering presented new avenues for inclusive projects that would not have been considered without them. In summary, the diversity of gender, race, class and ideologies at a large public university were formative in his lived experience and made him deeply aware of how little is done in many communities to uplift and enrich women and minorities in traditionally underrepresented spaces. Nicholas is actively seeking the voices that are representative of the communities Malleo, Inc. aims to serve and intends to learn from them to create educational products that are best poised to make a lasting difference. He is acutely aware of how valuable his lived experiences were in putting him on the path to specializing in a STEM field, and he wants to ensure that all others are inspired and encouraged similarly to explore similar paths. 

Holly is a licensed math teacher in Massachusetts and taught Science and Engineering courses as a high school teacher for 5 years. In her role as a faculty member of bioengineering at UIUC, she runs as NSF funded research group that designs mixed methods studies to understand impacts of curricula, including soft robotics, on students in K12 and undergraduate education. She also develops design-based curricula to support teachers bringing soft robotics into K12 classrooms and has recently developed curricula for Daisy and Brownie girl scouts to earn robotics badges through a soft robotics activity. Holly is also a core faculty member at the Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in the College of Engineering at UIUC. 

Conor’s research focuses on assistive technologies such as wearable soft robotic exosuits to assist the disabled and able-bodied alike. Both Conor and Holly’s life-long commitment to teaching and STEM position them as leaders and experts, capable of providing quality insight into creating valuable STEM curriculum. Past efforts by both Conor and Holly facilitated the delivery of dozens of our STEM kits to classrooms in India (~80 middle school children participated). Our entire founding team is dedicated to the topics of learning, innovation, STEM and soft robotics. As we grow and expand our team, we will deliberately seek team members who have the insights we need to better create value for the communities we aim to serve.

The Soft Robotics Toolkit was born out of an NSF award in 2014 to translate lab research knowledge to the public domain and create a community around the emerging field of soft robotics. It is an intellectual resource to enable technical literacy, build student confidence, and provide a platform for people from diverse backgrounds to learn how to develop their own soft robots. Since its inception, the website has generated more than 4 million page views, from 195 countries, facilitating more than 52,000 downloads, garnering an average of 350 visits per day.

Our platform was initially created for lab researchers and students as the general target audience. However, as a result of our curated platform containing tutorials, fabrication protocols, design files, and case studies, we started getting email interest from more diverse groups with varying backgrounds including fashion design, VR, human performance, agriculture, and art installation. These users were interested in learning more about soft robotics, but they didn’t know how to get started. Through this process, we discovered that soft robotics can have a significant impact by incorporating multiple disciplines and inviting demographic diversity. This led us to explore opportunities to bring awareness to soft robotics and make it more accessible. We saw an initial opportunity to bring the technology to students in the MS/HS (middle school and high school) range to expose them to soft robotics at an impressionable age. We began exploring STEM education to understand where soft robotics can bring value and improve current robotics offerings. It became clear that most robotics outreach initiatives emphasize computer programming for controlling robots (often assembled with pre-made components) in task-focused challenges. We realized there were potential opportunities for soft robotics, which includes mechanical design and construction of co-robotic (robot and human interaction) systems for human-centric, socially beneficial applications.

With a follow-on NSF award titled, NRI: Instructional Materials for Soft Co-Robot Design to Improve Motivation and Learning in STEM Classrooms, we developed a collection of instructional materials, known as fabrication guides, focused on low-cost design of soft co-robots, to improve students’ understanding of STEM subjects. We have learned a lot from running outreach workshops. Soft robotics differs from traditional educational robotics materials because it encompasses a multidisciplinary approach to designing robots that encourages collaboration between individuals from different academic domains. For our educational content we specifically focused on appropriate material selection, drawing inspiration from nature, manufacturing techniques, and mechanical design. Most recently, in collaboration with Professor Holly Golecki we conducted online professional development training for educators who then ran workshops for students (in Chicago and India). Our team presented the work at the American Society of Engineering Education titled “Adapting Soft Robotics Outreach to Teacher-delivered Curriculum in the Virtual Classroom”. Today, we have five soft robotics fabrication guides that have been downloaded 50,000 times and have been showcased in over ten lectures and workshops to over 600 public middle and high school students from the Greater Boston area, Chicago, New York City, Ireland, India, and Peru, with the majority from low-income communities.

Engaging Students and Creating Community through Online Competitions: It has been exciting to see the market pull validated further through the great engagement of our educational materials when we launched design competitions through our current online platform. We saw high school and undergraduate students design and create novel applications of their choice. PhD students and postdocs from worldwide research groups contributed new recent research findings that were then added to our digital platform for others to build off. In 2017 and 2018, Haverford High school won first place for high school entries. Their teacher at the time, Holly Golecki (now faculty at UIUC and cofounder for this project), used our five fabrication guides to introduce her students to soft robotics and equip them with the prerequisite knowledge and skills to innovate within a cutting-edge research field. We have now hosted four competitions with over 800 participants, which establishes us as one of the leading online soft robotics contests open to the public. The types of designs that the students came up with (e.g. edible soft robots, 3D silicone printer, foam robots, interactive toys) highlights how a soft robotics approach to STEM kits can enable significant creativity and a variety of ideas, thus engaging a more diverse population of students at a critical stage in their development.

These discoveries led to the development of a variety of materials, which we discuss at length in our other questions. We have run various outreach workshops to understand the potential for soft robotics in STEM education and how it differs from traditional educational robotics materials. A grant from the Tata Trusts in India enabled us to manufacture and deploy over 80 educational kits to high school students where we demonstrated evidence of the value of these materials. This is detailed in greater depth in our other answers.

We are applying to the Challenge for the primary reason of accessing a formal network of support for developing our curriculum and promoting our products through meaningful channels to reach a greater audience. The resource partners provided to winners of the Challenge will undoubtedly have crucial insights into how to solicit a wider net of input and feedback from the specific markets we intend to sell to. We also hope the leadership coaching will provide focused time to grow our team’s understanding of the needs of our target market. While we are confident that the technical content of our potential product is sound, we need the input of professionals familiar with manufacturing at scale to better inform the physical content of a given STEM kit. Furthermore, the peer network of like-minded people and businesses who also represent and care about improving gender equity will be invaluable for our mission of seeking informed input into the design and distribution of our STEM kit experiences. We are excited at the prospect of accessing a community of like-minded individuals with relevant backgrounds and insight in order to develop Malleo, Inc. into a company that delivers the greatest impact possible.

The financial support provided from the award will allow us to transition our work from Harvard University to a start-up so that project lead Nick can focus on the project full time. It will also allow us to recruit other team members  to the company for design and manufacturing, and fabricate many of the initial STEM kits to distribute to our first customers. The resources provided by the award regarding product models and budgeting will be invaluable in the growth and development of our STEM kits. While we have performed preliminary work to understand our target markets and a path to success, these topics all need further refinement and exploration.

The Team Lead, Nicholas Bira, is originally from the state of Missouri. He grew up in multiple areas across the state, all of them with rural communities. Many of the people he grew up alongside never pursued STEM field studies past high school, as is commonly the case for rural communities in America. Nicholas directly benefited from exposure to STEM ideas when he visited the Saint Louis Science Center, and got to play with LEGO robotics as a child. Those early experiences were formative in his interest to pursue higher education in robotics, and he is passionate about bringing equally engaging opportunities to underrepresented communities so they might also have the same engagement and opportunities to consider careers in STEM.

As an undergraduate student at the University of Missouri, Nicholas was involved in multiple leadership roles focused on improving access to education and technology. As the president of the 3D Printing Club, he led multiple initiatives to develop 3D printed wearable prosthetics in collaboration with medical professionals, children and adults with physical disabilities in his community. He was awarded a grant by the University to lead a team to design and create a 3D printed tactile map of campus so students with visual disabilities could experience the layout of campus and have tactile information about buildings, roads, and street crossings labeled in braille. He later received another grant to initiate a 3D printing service for all students on campus, regardless of school affiliation, to educate about the technology and provide fabrication technologies for everyone. In his junior year, Nicholas co-taught a class on 3D printing and design through the Education department, providing hands-on learning experiences for a diverse group of students from different educational backgrounds. Nicholas also volunteered as a judge and educator for teaching middle school students about robotics through the LEGO robotics program and competitions.

During his graduate studies at Oregon State University, Nicholas participated in the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry Science Communication Fellowship. He commuted to Portland on multiple occasions to present to hundreds of school children on soft robotic concepts, demonstrations and hands-on learning. During his academic pursuits, he also mentored summer undergraduate research students with diverse gender identities in robotics research.

Now, as a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard in the BioDesign lab working with Conor Walsh and Holly Golecki, Nicholas is seeking to find a pathway to transition the Soft Robotics Toolkit work on educational kits from a research project, to a start-up.  This summer Nicholas will be a summer camp educator with EXPLO, running multiple week-long STEM learning experiences about the topic of soft robotics. This summer camp has a proven track record for engaging youth from across the Massachusetts area.

While there are a variety of educational products on the market from different sources, our educational products are uniquely positioned to have a lasting impact. The soft robotic principles contained in our kits are based on nearly 9 years of vetted academic research, and our founding members are a dedicated team of education and robotics experts. The interdisciplinary nature of soft robotics and the subfields of STEM that it involves provide a uniquely engaging way to connect with underrepresented groups in STEM, presenting legitimate scientific and engineering principles through intuitive, hands-on experiences. Soft robotics are a gateway for many students who may have an interest in one area of STEM (biology or chemistry) and introduce them to many others (such as computer science, mechanical/electrical engineering, and physics). A key feature of soft robotics is embodied intelligence, or the capacity of soft robots to embed a rich feature set of behaviors that are a direct result of the flexible and deformable materials they are made from. In traditional rigid robotics, many of these complex motions or behaviors require far more complex control and mechanics to achieve. As biological machines ourselves, humans respond more intuitively to mechanical designs and structures that resemble those found in nature (such as our own human anatomy and how muscles move, or the actuation strategies of a fish or an octopus). Soft robotic educational materials link the intuitive and biological with the more mature and esoteric STEM fields. 

As Malleo, Inc. grows and provides our products to broader audiences, it will inevitably begin to shape how young people think about robotics and what strategies there are for engineering solutions. No other educational companies currently provide the materials and curriculum for learning the full principles of soft robotics. Companies such as VEX Robotics and organizations such as FIRST (the LEGO robotics competition non-profit) currently provide many opportunities for children and teenagers to engage with entry-level robotics, but they have no real soft robotic offerings. As our products enter these markets, it will incentivize these existing groups to consider incorporating our offerings into their efforts, either through collaboration or with inspired products. Either way, the existence of our STEM kits on the market will expand the current offerings for robotics into currently unfilled spaces. As a result of engaging more girls and minority students with robotics, it will enrich and grow these existing sectors as well as more students participate and are drawn to these programs.

In the next year as we finish development of our initial three STEM Kits and begin to partner with key collaborators in education environments such as the Boston Museum of Science and classrooms in the greater Boston area. As we initiate these learning experiences and partner with science summer camps and afterschool programs, we will rapidly iterate and improve our initial offerings to better serve the engagement and retention of girls and underrepresented students in these spaces. We will take our early focus group experiences to improve our kits until they consistently create robust learning outcomes for these groups. In the years that follow, we will grow and hire more experts, develop further products, and expand our focus to include the broader US market, as well as sell to individuals instead of groups. The impact of this larger market coverage will create conversations about girls' involvement in STEM, increase girls and minority students’ interest in STEM, and increase STEM literacy nationwide. 

We aim to create a growing community of young students who are knowledgeable and passionate about STEM as a direct result of participating in our curriculum and with our kits. These kits are not just a one-time experience; the impact of participating in the learning process should result in lasting interest in STEM, especially robotics. Motivated students will be compelled to seek additional learning opportunities from Malleo, Inc. in the form of purchasing more kits, join related activities such as LEGO robotics teams, participate in more summer camps, or begin to pursue activities where they gain the confidence to be self-taught using the fundamentals instilled during our STEM Kit learning experiences. By providing the materials to learn, iterate, and experiment our company will directly contribute to expanding access to soft robotics technology and inspire the next generation of STEM enthusiasts as they head towards higher learning. We hope to eventually run design competitions for these demographics using our STEM kits as a basis, much in the way the precursor project the Soft Robotics Toolkit, successfully engaged large groups of academics and high school students.

To achieve these lofty goals, we will need to partner with key educational institutions and educators in the Boston area. After successful deployment and improvement of our initial offerings, we will expand to classrooms and clubs across Massachusetts, and eventually extend to the rest of the USA. This growth strategy will enable us to match the demand for our products and grow as a company at the same rate at which our products are being consumed. We are committed to a sustainable business model that creates US jobs with US-based manufacturing. We are already in talks with MassRobotics as a potential partner to incubate and grow with for the first phases of our effort.

For our initial focus group product tests, outreach events through summer camps, and the classrooms in India, we performed user surveys before and after the STEM Kit experiences. Feedback from the participating students revealed a few key findings: students are intrinsically motivated to design and build robots, and the notion of soft components in robotics is novel for most students (Golecki, Adapting Soft Robotics Outreach to Teacher-Delivered Curriculum in the Virtual Classroom, 2021). Young girls from a girl scout troop who participated in soft robotics curriculum reported increased interest in robotics and drew themselves as building and cooperating with robots in assessment tasks afterwards. For the trial manufacturing run of kits that were created in India, students assembled a full kit over several hours with educator supervision. One of the clearest statistically relevant outcomes was a marked decrease in anxiety in the educators after facilitating our kits regarding their confidence in being able to teach STEM topics. The educators reported how their students began to relate the content of their experiences to local issues and concerns in their communities, and discussed how they might be able to use robotics to solve their problems with pollution. One teacher is quoted as saying “Girls always do app design instead of robotics… [the kits] involved design, drawing, exploring, all interested by girls. If we continue to teach this, we believe we would have more girls than boys.”

We are running more focus groups soon in collaboration with EXPLO summer camps in July, to further assess the impact and self-reported interest from all students on the impact of our kits. The Soft Robotics Toolkit (SRT), which this project is partially derived from, consistently has many regular visitors to the website, to explore the hosted educational academic content. The SRT often receives direct emails asking for further information and the option to purchase content hosted on the website. These voluntary communications further underline the interest by a broad community of individuals interested in soft robotic products. We receive approximately a dozen emails a month seeking products from the SRT, which is fundamentally an academic resource page. We are constantly seeking potential user input, and continually seeking interviews with educators in the relevant domains to get their insight into the needs of students and the obstacles to engagement.

The existence of soft robotic educational content is innately more approachable for girls and underrepresented students, as the novel, interdisciplinary content of the STEM Kits will pique their interest more than other currently available experiences. Soft Robotics intersects the more popular fields of biology, medicine and chemistry with the more male-dominated fields of engineering, computer science and physics. This acts as a gateway to encourage participation and retention, and serves to bridge the gender gap and sustain lasting engagement. Our purpose-built curriculum will contain numerous examples of women and minority participants depicted in the imagery and the act of using these kits. By including depictions of diverse people in the curriculum, students will more closely align their self-perceptions and identity with STEM professionals. By participating in our STEM kits, students will gain a knowledge of a wide number of STEM topics that surround the subject of soft robotics, and girls and underrepresented students in particular will experience greater identification with STEM. This enhanced belief and proven success will encourage long-lasting participation and retain greater numbers of women and underrepresented students throughout the various levels of education. Longer term, we hope our products will inspire students to seek additional learning opportunities, engage with more Soft Robotic products, and make logical connections between areas of their own lives and that of STEM professionals. Our quality learning experiences will serve to retain girls and minority students in the crucial learning years of middle school and facilitate their participation in STEM topics into adulthood. These sorts of interventions are well-documented as having an impact (Sainz, Interventions to increase young people's interest in STEM, 2022). By leveraging the passion and expertise of our founders and partnering with educational specialists, we aim to create lasting opportunities in the lives of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM.

The technologies present in our educational STEM kits draw from a wide breadth of STEM subject areas, but our kits primarily contain the fundamentals of the research field of soft robotics. The core technologies and methods emphasized in our kits are: molding/casting of hyperelastic materials, textile and paper-based mechanisms, remote actuation, soft actuators, electromagnetism, biomimicry, and more. All of these concepts are well-documented in the research field of soft robotics in academic publications, but are not represented within the typical offerings of other STEM kit experiences that typically utilize traditional rigid robotics, classic mechanics and physics, and more traditional science demonstrations to communicate scientific principles. The technology we intend to educate students on will all be open-sourced designs and will be deliberately chosen to be replicable, easily understandable for all learning styles, and well-documented to encourage future engagement with the subject material. We intend to leverage the most current educational methodologies for our kits to ensure they comply with expectations such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) set forth by the various states of the United States of America. In this way, educators will be certain our curriculum adheres to the requirements of the classroom, as well as the rigor of modern educational theory.

There are three co-founders who are pushing to take this research out of the lab: Dr. Nicholas Bira is the lead on this project, and Profs. Conor Walsh and Holly Golecki are advisors and committed contributors to the educational rigor and engineering content of these kits. Many past Harvard students have contributed academic research and developed aspects of the core educational ideas since the inception of the Soft Robotics Toolkit back in 2014. Nicholas will be the only full-time employee in the beginning phases, with the intention to hire others once more funding is acquired.

Many aspects of Malleo, Inc. are descended from the contributions of past academics since the founding of the Soft Robotics Toolkit in 2014. In that regard, the core principles present in the initial offerings of Malleo, Inc. have been in development for almost nine years. The Gripper Kit is the most well-developed, with past versions of the kit being tested for research and outreach purposes. Malleo, Inc. will be the vehicle to to translate this research into products for education, and was recently established (May 2023) for the explicit purpose of seeking funding, hiring educators, and developing more products.

Primarily, our aim is to create valuable learning experiences that especially engage girls and underrepresented students in middle school through curriculum developed based on vetted science and technology. While our team is small, we aim to grow and bring on more educators, designers, and participants who will also bring greater diversity of opinion and experience to better create valuable products that serve our target users. Our leadership team is familiar with the necessity of diversity and inclusion as long-time educators and academics, and diversity and inclusion are a core value in our company. As we grow and bring on more team members, we want to offer competitive and equitable salaries that are commensurate with their role in the success of our company. We fully intend to seek and recruit for new members from the communities we intend to work within. With the resources provided by the Challenge, we will actively seek collaborators from other reward recipients, and seek the advice and guidance of mentors to find diverse collaborators.  In the early stages of growth, we intend to have a horizontally organized team, where each contributor has the opportunity to give their insight and opinions on group decisions regarding next steps for product development.

To begin, our business model will be to cater directly to supplementary educational experience spaces, such as after-school programs, summer camps, science museums and extracurricular clubs. These organizations represent focused, deliberate spaces for children to learn, and often consume educational programming to provide such learning. The key customers will be the organizers in these groups who are responsible for choosing curriculum and materials for their group. By approaching these organizers for our initial market, we aim to make our first sales and establish a record with reputable educational groups. After this initial push and with the revenue from the first year of effort, we will expand manufacturing to begin to sell directly to consumers and educators. We hope to expand beyond the local effort for the supplementary educational market in the Boston area to encompass all of Massachusetts, and eventually ship beyond state borders shortly after. In this way, we will expand access to our soft robotics STEM curriculum for a broadening audience, while developing an expanding resource for existing, prior customers to continue to choose products from. The primary product will be educational kits and the accompanying curriculum, but we also intend to sell standalone materials so more advanced students can explore a broader range of soft robotic designs on their own, or to incorporate them into other educational products and robots. This resource does not currently exist for consumers or educators, and it provides an appealing avenue for both as a means to education and empowering girls and underrepresented students to engage with STEM topics. Potential buyers will want these products as they provide learning, entertainment, and STEM enrichment with demonstrated value. Organizations seeking educational curriculum to promote STEM participation and improve diversity within their offerings will look to our product line as a means to fulfill both ends.

The initial plan is to manufacture our initially available kits, which we intend to have three versions of, as well as the supporting curriculum and packaging to have a reliable supply of materials for initial orders. We will begin with reaching out through available connections to relevant entities such as the Museum of Science in Boston, as well as organizations like 4H and Girl Scouts, as initial customers. Once the initial sales grow in these sectors, we will diversify our reach to include individuals seeking to buy these products (parents, teachers, family members), as well as formal educators (teachers in school settings, homeschools). By approaching each of these market segments in order, we hope to sustainably grow our capacity for manufacturing these kits proportionally to the revenue generated from their sales. Deliberate effort has gone into designing these kits to be cost effective, such that the barrier to purchase them is reduced to reach a broader audience, and the difficulty with manufacturing them at scale should be reduced as well. We hope to partner with key educational institutions such as regional science museums, summer camp entities, and eventually with educational institutions seeking to incorporate our unique curriculum and product lines. As we scale, we will bring on additional team members to assist with developing new products and scaling our manufacturing capabilities. Over the next year or so, we intend to pursue multiple non-dilutive grant funding, such as an SBIR grant to help support the up-front costs of development and competitive hiring practices. After the initial push to develop a product line, hire a diverse and competent team, prove the market demand and secure startup funds to accommodate the initial costs, we will then seek investor funding to grow and expand beyond the local markets in Massachusetts, to serve the broader USA.

Long-term, we intend to sell a diverse selection of STEM kits, as well as many supporting compatible elements that accompany the kits, such as silicones ideal for soft robotics, Arduino-compatible components, specific fabrics, and prefabricated assemblies, soft actuators and molds. We intend to have some materials available for purchase online digitally, such as 3D models for 3D printing your own molds to manufacture at home. In this way, a diverse product portfolio with initial grant and potentially venture capital funding will propel us towards a future of profitable, sustainable business.

Our initial work on the Soft Robotics Toolkit was born out of the broader impact of an NSF National Robotics Initiative award in 2014 titled: NRI: Small: Integrated modeling and manufacturing framework for soft fluidic robotics (award #1317744). This allowed us to translate lab research knowledge to the public domain and create a community around the emerging field of soft robotics. It was intended as an intellectual resource to enable technical literacy, build student confidence, and provide a platform for people from diverse backgrounds to learn how to develop their own soft robots. Since its inception, the website has generated more than 3.5 million page views, from 195 countries, facilitating more than 52,000 downloads, garnering an average of 350 visits per day. With a follow-on NSF award in 2016 titled, NRI: Instructional Materials for Soft Co-Robot Design to Improve Motivation and Learning in STEM Classrooms (award #1526327), we developed a collection of instructional materials, known as fabrication guides, focused on low-cost design of soft co-robots, to improve students’ understanding of STEM subjects. This also enabled us to run various outreach workshops to understand the potential for soft robotics in STEM education and how it differs from traditional educational robotics materials because it encompasses. A grant from the Tata Trusts in India enabled us to manufacture and deploy over 80 educational kts to high school students in India where we demonstrated evidence of the value of our efforts, as described in our earlier answers regarding impact. Recognizing for our work to move beyond the lab, our team applied for and secured an NSF I-Corps grant titled: I-Corps: Soft Robotic Toolkit for Students and Researchers (award #2121958) to perform customer discovery and understand market opportunity for our soft robotics educational kits. This led to our team securing a final NSF grant in 2022 from the NSF Partnership for Innovation (PFI) program titled: PFI-TT: Soft robotic educational kits for recruiting a more diverse group of students into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields (award #2213926). This grant is currently supporting team lead Nicholas Bira at Harvard, with the explicit goal of determining how we can translate our team’s efforts from an academic environment to a start-up.