About our Founder: Danielle Boyer

Forging her path as an Indigenous, Queer, and Neurodivergent teen committed to providing opportunities for kids like her.

About Danielle

Danielle is an award-winning Indigenous teen who is recognized for her work as an entrepreneur, author, activist, and inventor, much of which orbits around educating children on the future of technology and innovation. For over ten years now, Danielle has been working to make key educational opportunities accessible. After witnessing how disparities between people of different socioeconomic statuses in access to quality technical education affect children, Danielle sought to transform her community by increasing technical educational accessibility and affordability for young children through innovative learning solutions that utilize robotics to promote technical competency, garner interest in STEM careers, and to equip the future generation of innovators with a unique and diverse skillset. This goal has driven her to start her own educational nonprofit called The STEAM Connection. Danielle has gone on to reach tens of thousands of students around the world with her educational resources and is only getting started as a young voice in the industry. 

Getting Started

Danielle got her start in STEAM education at age ten while she was being homeschooled in her hometown of Troy, Michigan. 

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There not being many STEAM educational opportunities through her homeschool group and seeing how her little sister wouldn't be able to access key learning opportunities, she sought for a solution. Not knowing where to start, she eventually saw animal puppets at Costco and wanted to teach an Animal Science class where each student received their own puppet at the end of the class. The opportunity was an unlikely one, but Danielle was fortunate to teach this semester-long class.

This was the first class of many and opened her eyes to the world of how inaccessible STEAM education truly is, and how well-funded communities could access key learning opportunities whereas her own Indigenous community could not.  

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Danielle has grown up amidst great abuse and tragedy, and found that being able to help her community and create helped keep her sane. Living with C-PTSD, Depression, and Mood Dysregulation Disorder has been difficult, but she uses her struggles to move onward and protect and help the child she once was.

High School

After being homeschooled for most of her life, Danielle decided to pursue a future at her local public high school, Troy High. This was where she started pursuing helping local community robotics teams, designing robots, and pursuing the world of volunteering. During the year of 2018, Danielle started 23 community programs to benefit her county, Oakland County, through projects like OCCRA (Oakland County Competitive Robotics Association) and Benzene Bots. This is also when Danielle started 30 robotics teams to better serve the students of Oakland County. She still mentors her teams and works alongside her community every single day.

And Beyond

Soon after graduating in 2018, Danielle started putting her nonprofit in motion to bring affordable and accessible STEAM education to BIPOC youth. She founded The STEAM Connection in the beginning of 2019 and invented EKGAR and published her first five books then as well. 

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Now, Danielle reaches tens of thousands of students and seeks to use her experiences as an Indigenous, Queer, and Neurodivergent teen to learn from and benefit her communities through accessible tech and culturally competent resources.