Schools are, and forever will be, the key to our future. Students grow up spending the majority of their time at a desk, at school. A typical U.S. student spends 8,884 hours over nine years to complete primary and lower secondary education. If students are spending thousands of hours at school, how can we [businesses] help make it more fun and memorable?
Build With Robots sees the value in education, and that has always included the value of working with your hands. Breezy One is a testament to that.
Take it from Edwin Ochoa, one of our lead Mechanical Engineers:
“I get to use my education when I engineer Breezy. But what I love is that I get to work with my hands and assemble things that alone may only be wires and metal, but together create an autonomous robot”.
Although some may associate Build With Robots with just robots and automation, the company culture also offers a space for learning. “We always aim for perfection…but what we excel at is sharing our knowledge from the diverse backgrounds we come from,” says Chris Zoimek, CEO. That philosophy translates to the entire team, just take one walk through our building and you’ll see quotes, drawings, and brainstorms written on almost every wall.
What does this have to do with education?
As we deploy Breezy One’s across the nation, we are not just deploying an autonomous disinfecting robot. Breezy One is a symbol of imagination, creativity, and possibility. But if you talk to any member of our team, you’ll come to find that not a single one of us got here solely by going to class.
Learning experiences outside the classroom are known as experiential learning. These experiences are rooted in the simple principle that “experience is the best teacher.” Research has shown that students that participate in experiential learning have higher levels of motivation, remember course material more vividly, and have improved academic performance (Takeuchi et al., 2016; Ryan and Deci, 2017).
- field trips
- study abroad
- technology outside (and inside) the classroom
- competitions
Take RoboRave as an example. The program teaches students and teachers how to design, build, program, and test robots to perform a variety of tasks. Their mission of, “Today's Play, Tomorrow's Pay" embodies the point of education; that things should be fun yet directed, and their 25 years of operation shows just how successful they’ve been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO-cyUF44c4
For schools looking to galvanize students, field experiences can be one of the best tools, as experiential learning has been shown to inspire students to continue in a field.
Schools like St. Mary’s (ABQ, NM) have captured this extremely well.
St. Mary’s Catholic School, a K-8th grade school from Albuquerque, New Mexico, also deployed one of the first Breezy One’s this past year.
When Breezy’s are deployed, our team will run microbial tests to ensure we are disinfecting at the level we promise (99.9999%). To do this, we set out dishes packed with pathogens; measuring the levels of bacteria before and after we fog a facility. It is a relatively simple procedure that can be replicated by almost anyone. So simple, that even students at St. Mary’s could run their own tests in their 8th-grade science.
They not only found that Breezy does in fact kill 99.9999% of bacteria throughout the facility but experienced how hands-on science can be done. From microbial testing to robotics competitions, Breezy can be used for more than disinfecting.
Educations Future
The workforce needs will forever be changing, and education will always follow to fill those needs. But the question that remains is how education will teach these needs. Is it a matter of relevant/innovative curriculum being supplied to teachers or a matter of training teachers to deliver content? Regardless, some school districts still lag behind in resources needed to give their students such experiences. As a company, we want to be a force for good and therefore acknowledge our role in educating the next generation.
Our Commitment to Education
Our role as a company goes beyond robots. We recognize our responsibility to our community, and we value the support we’ve been given. A company is always more than the product, and that’s how we see Breezy. Our autonomy robot is the best way to disinfect, but also a tool to educate the future high-tech workforce that we will need.
For schools looking for a hands-on curriculum, Breezy OneTM can be leveraged in:
- Occupational robotics
- Sensors & automation
- Cloud data visualization & analytics coding
- Machine assembly & servicing
- Bioscience of pathogen sampling & disinfection
- Entrepreneurship
- Digital media
Our employees are open to volunteering at local schools that would like to see this in action; from lectures to guest speakers, just email Christian.slough@buildwithrobots.com for volunteer inquiries and ideas!
As a start-up, we are nimble, collaborative, and remain open-minded to what the future can be. We are always looking to work with schools, to keep them safe, but also to make learning fun. When Build With Robots looks to the future, we see a community of learners ready to open books and open minds.
