Robots, Access, and Language Revitalization
Danielle Boyer is Ojibwe, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. She began teaching science to younger children at age 10. As a teenager she saw her younger sister shut out of a robotics team that cost hundreds of dollars to join — a small example of a larger pattern in which cost, distance, and representation keep many Native students out of STEM. In 2019, at 18, she founded The STEAM Connection, a nonprofit that designs low-cost robots and sends kits to students for free.
Boyer treats cost as a design constraint, not an afterthought. Her EKGAR ("Every Kid Gets A Robot") is built for under $20 in parts, compared with hundreds of dollars for many commercial kits. Her robots are 3D-printed from recycled plastic, which lowers cost and lets communities reprint and repair parts rather than replacing them.
Her best-known invention is the SkoBot, a wearable shoulder robot built to support the revitalization of endangered Indigenous languages, many of which have few fluent speakers left. The SkoBot uses speech recognition — a narrow form of artificial intelligence that Boyer built and trained herself. On hearing a voice cue it recognizes, it plays a recording of a fluent speaker saying a word or phrase. The design choice is deliberate: the robot never generates language on its own, so the words students hear always come from people in the community.
Reporting on the project has put the cost of an early SkoBot at around $100 per unit, with a goal of bringing that down much further. Boyer teaches Native students to assemble and program SkoBots themselves, an approach sometimes described as designing with a community rather than for it. Her work has been covered by NPR, ABC News, and the Lemelson Foundation.
