Engineering Access, One Kit at a Time
Danielle Boyer is Ojibwe, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. She began teaching science to younger kids at age 10. As a teenager she watched her younger sister get priced out of a robotics team that cost hundreds of dollars to join, and she started designing robots that were cheap enough to give away. In 2019, at 18, she founded The STEAM Connection, a nonprofit that sends free robotics kits to students, especially Native youth.
Her low-cost robot EKGAR — "Every Kid Gets A Robot" — costs under $20 in parts. Her robots are 3D-printed from recycled plastic, which keeps them affordable and easy to repair or remake.
Her best-known invention is the SkoBot, a robot worn on the shoulder that helps students learn endangered Indigenous languages. It uses speech recognition, a narrow form of artificial intelligence that Boyer built and trained herself. The robot listens for a specific voice cue, matches it to a word it has been trained on, and then plays a recording of a fluent speaker saying that word or phrase. The SkoBot does not invent sentences — the language always comes from real speakers.
Boyer teaches Native students to assemble and program their own SkoBots, so the students are building the technology, not just using it. Her work has been featured by NPR, ABC News, and the Lemelson Foundation.
