Danielle Boyer is a 22-year-old Indigenous (Ojibwe) robotics inventor and advocate for youth who has been teaching kids since she was ten. Driven by her families own inability to afford science and technology education, she is passionate about making education accessible and representative for her community so that no child is left behind. Danielle creates equitable and innovative learning solutions for Indigenous youths with robots that she designs, manufactures, and gives away for free. In 2019 at age eighteen, she created The STEAM Connection, a minority and youth-led charity that has reached hundreds of thousands of children worldwide with technical education with an emphasis on language revitalization. The STEAM Connection focuses on the future: ushering in a new age of education via personal and wearable robotics, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. Informed by the past and present, The STEAM Connection utilizes traditional knowledge to uplift and protect Indigenous communities with an emphasis on language. Her goal is not necessarily to get youth into STEM careers but rather to equip them with the skills to solve the problems that they see in their communities now. This must be done with technology the kids can relate to... and she's creating it.
“An antiracist future is a decolonized future, and this means addressing our power dynamics, we talked about representation, that’s awesome, but it’s very hard to gain footing when it’s representation in someone else's system and they have power there. We need to lead our own solutions for our own communities, and this looks like different things for all of us.”
-Danielle Boyer for the MIT Solve Antiracist and Indigenous Futures Summit
Her flagship invention is Every Kid Gets a Robot (EKGAR), an innovative educational robotics kit that costs less than $20 dollars to make and is sent to youth for free, increasing their technical competency and understanding with a culturally competent curriculum. Her most recent invention is the SkoBot, created alongside her mentors. It is a personalized, wearable, and interactive Indigenous language revitalization robot that senses motion and speaks. The students build the robots themselves. Built to take tech learning out of the classroom, the robots were made to supplement community language learning for free. It has been a success in enabling youth to bring the robots home to learn with their families and in creating learning tools they resonate with.
Danielle is Ojibwe, an enrolled citizen of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians (also referred to as the Sault Tribe) - a federally recognized Tribe. It is pronounced Soo Saint Marie. Enrollment documentation is available upon request or you can contact the Sault Tribe Enrollment Department.
Creating the first cultural robots.
11k+
Free EKGAR robots sent
800k+
Youths reached with our representative educational resources
31k+
Users making robots on our Make-A-Robot Platform
100%
Designed by youth for youth for free
The highlights
Danielle has been named one of PEOPLE Magazine's Girls Changing the World, a MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellow, a L'oreal Paris Woman of Worth, a Teen Vogue Indigenous Youth Changemaker, NDN Collective Changemaker Fellow, an Echoing Green Fellow, and a Verizon Forward for Good Winner. She is a two-time guest, three-time invitee of the White House and is a featured story in The Big Idea by MIT Solve x HP, an award-winning docu-series on three women innovators. "Indigenous Robotics" followed her life for a year and premiered at the MIT Museum. It is currently showing at film festivals, with the series winning 10+ awards.
Special moments at The STEAM Connection.