Our Story

Our roots begin in the COVID-19 pandemic. During a period of so much change and shifts in educational opportunities, many summer camps were not able to run or became brief virtual experiences. Students didn’t have the same opportunities that they had prior to 2020. We remembered as kids that these STEM-themed summer camps were one of the pivotal pieces that cultivated our interests in this field. Summer projects involving STEM combined with fun summer camp activities paired learning quality skills with lifelong memories and making new friends. However, during the pandemic, many middle schoolers did not have these fun opportunities due to social distancing guidelines in the San Francisco Bay Area and the high prices of the STEM summer camps that were virtual. This gap in educational opportunity was how Junior Robotics was born. 

 

At its inception, Jacob Endrina, Anthony O'Neil, and Maanit Sharma decided to create curriculums for middle school students and teach Introduction to CAD in Onshape and Introduction to Python classes. As the need for Junior Robotics continued to be evident, others joined in this vision. Cayden Tu took his years of experience with Junior Robotics to expand the program to include elementary levels, and Chris Voon adapted programs for a juvenile audience. Cayden has also been working with AI to improve the quality of the curriculum to help keep young students engaged, integrating outcomes derived from ChatGPT prompts into the process of curriculum design.

 

We first contacted St. Dunstan School in Millbrae, CA, and taught a 6-week virtual camp consisting of these classes to 12 students. Because of the great feedback, we reached out to other schools and received interest from the De Marillac Academy and the Father Sauer Academy, both in San Francisco, CA. We taught the same classes to over 30 students from these schools and received more amazing feedback to continue in the fall. 

 

This was when we decided to create Junior Robotics, a non-profit dedicated to providing free, accessible STEM education to underrepresented youth. We make the curriculum, recruit high school volunteers, reach out to schools around the country to help with their STEM programs, and teach these classes. We are now developing course offerings for students in grades 3-5.

 

After the successful implementation with middle school students, we decided to expand to elementary school students. Teaching young students requires content adaptation and instruction focused not just on content but on communication. Further, we decided to expand our influence beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. Many students in California have exposure to coding. Classes and community resources there for technology are more abundant than in other areas. This is not the case in many parts of the country. In our current expansion, we are working to provide learning opportunities to students in rural communities and to Title 1 schools. Students are now enrolling across the country, including places like South Carolina. Most recently, we were able to connect with Father Sauer Academy, St. Ignatius' partner middle school for underserved students, to offer a year-round for-credit class, with multiple St. Ignatius students acting as co-teachers of the course in order to ensure that the student to teacher ratio never exceeds 3:1 and all students get individual guidance.

 

Junior Robotics was created to meet the educational needs of children who may not have access to STEM-related programs and opportunities. We hope to continue our mission and use our passion for STEM to inspire future generations of computer scientists and engineers.