Partner - TechyEducators

This page has been put together to help potential partners gain a deeper understanding of TechyKids.

1) Background

The Story Behind TechyKids

As a kid, Sharon Marzouk, Founder and CEO of TechyKids thrived in school with cross disciplinary hands-on projects. But these opportunities are often dependent on the individual teacher, and not part of the regular school system.

She wanted to create more of a path for this type of learning that engages learners by allowing them to combine their unique creativity, perspective, and skillsets with concepts that need to be grasped. Doing this personalizes the learning experience and makes it more meaningful, therefore sticky.

Giving learners a strong foundation, increases interest and the speed of learning. It prepares kids for their future in a fast-changing environment, allowing them the confidence to learn anything. This started her on the path to developing a different type of pedagogy leading to TechyKids.

Along this journey she moved across the country to the Bay Area, led many robotics programs for kids, from Wizbots to being a mentor at Hack the Future. She has been an active yearly and award-winning exhibitor and presenter at Bay Area Maker Faire and the Robot Block Party. She partnered with Willow Garage to develop and lead the PR2 program at The Tech, an exhibit to teach kids how to program the $400K research robot.

When she was working at the robotics company, Willow Garage she ran into a researcher working in educational robotics and he showed her the Thymio robot that he and his university lab had created. After spending years teaching with the Lego Mindstorm she realized how superior of a platform this was in being able to teach robotics to kids. It removed many of the hardships from the teaching perspectives, it had increased learning value, and it also appealed to all genders, ages and interest fields.

She wanted for the average parent / person to understand this amazing value that she saw, as opposed to looking at this 20-sensor, 2-motor robotics learning platform, and calling it a car. TechyKids was born! Sharon then started teaching at a private school as a K-8 Technology Teacher. She brought the Thymio into her classroom and started developing creating an innovative learning program for her students. She taught them to get passionate about learning and thinking about the world around them, and doing so while also teaching the best things she learned in engineering school, all while also high powering their abilities and increasing their thinking capacity.

TechyKids evolved year after year of working with the kids and refining a cohesive path for growth. A big goal of TechyKids was to make the difficult job of scaffolding the original project creation process with real skills being learned scalable and taught correctly, as there is a severe shortage of those who are technical, good with kids, and working in education. The next step was to high power those teachers who did exhibit those skillsets to be able to share their teachings more widely and be able to then personalize learnings for students with top notch learning materials.

Being a woman engineer and educator, passionate about creativity, art and human-centered design she wants to empower more girls to pursue robotics, and everyone to be empowered and capable of making a positive difference in the world. She plans to continue growing TechyKids to help introduce technology programs at schools with quality content and projects that engage the brain and the heart.

Sharon Marzouk Tedx Future of Education Video Excerpt

This 5.5 Minute video explains the overarching philosophy of TechyKids

2) The Realization

There are many gaps in the current education system that need to be filled in order to prepare the current generation for life. Doing projects that connect learning, make the experience meaningful and sticky.

3) The Mission

Teach to all abilities and interests by engaging eyes, ears, hands, mind.

Meet the person where they are and grow them along a constructive path.

Combine our expertise with their passions and creativity so everyone learns and grows from one another.

Teach people to be creators and collaborators that work to make our world better.

Create a Global curriculum that is a common language across borders and religions. Foster ethics, communication and collaboration.

4) Explaining TechyKids for Schools

5) Explaining TechyKids from the Product and Website Perspective

6) The Curricular Content & Flow

This map is clickable to take you to the courses, but you need to have a TechyKids account with access to the different courses, and be logged in. This is an example of a map used in our camps. There is more content available than what is shown in map, this is just an example. Please contact [email protected] for a trial account.

If you want to try learning from our content, but do not have the Thymio Robot on hand, you could try this course:

TechyKids Robotics Web Course

Program a virtual Thymio robot on the web. Learn about sensors and robotics, visual programming, and how to see real javascript code!

This course is recommended for beginners for at home or in the classroom. You’ll love the creativity and technical skills needed to create an awesome Thymio robot web project!

7) The Elements and Design

You can see the Elements of the TechyKids system on our “For Schools” Page.

8) How to Use TechyKids as a Student

9) The Results

Scalable School Solution - Repeatable Results

Mrs. Julia Dweck was inspired by the TechyKids program to apply for a district wide grant along with 3 other educators from her school. She was awarded the largest district grant from the PTA, and successfully ran the TechyKids program for her 4-6th grade gifted students at Willow Lane Elementary in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Check out the video to the right to hear her story of using TechyKids into her classroom and the amazing student outcomes!

Thinking of writing a grant? Check out Mrs. Dweck’s successfully written grant for TechyKids. Use it to help write your own!

Diverse Learning Experiences in One Environment Workshop

The Belle Haven workshop was open to anyone 6 – 103 years of age. Families attended the workshop together. Everyone was provided with their own workstation and robot and was given a list of three project to choose from. They were given their own personal account and learning path on the TechyKids system. Everyone was in the same environment working at their own level and to their own interests. Coding, building, art, 3-D modeling and robotics were all being learned and performed across all ages in parallel.

Individual Gained Confidence, Breaking through Learning Disabilities

We interviewed Kevin a participant in our 2015 Summer camp. He talks about his struggles with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia and what he was able to achieve in our robotics camp!

200+ Original Projects Created By Kids

Check out some of our favorite projects here.