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.

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.