+Research, Development, & Scale
Meet the SkoBot
A Language Revitalization Robot for Indigenous Languages
The first Anishinaabemowin speaking robot.
A personal, wearable, and interactive Indigenous language revitalization robot that responds to being spoken to in the voices of Indigenous children in the endangered Indigenous language Anishinaabemowin which utilizes ethical, sustainable, and internally developed AI. The students build the robots themselves. The robots reimagine a future with Anishinaabe toys and were made to supplement community language learning (never replace it) for free. They were created by Danielle Boyer, an enrolled member of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
Get A SkoBot: Waitlist Open
Our Virtual SkoBots Shop for Indigenous high school students waitlist is now open. Get added to our waitlist today. Our new programs begin in January, 2022.
my story
Boozhoo nindanawemaaganidog. Nindizhinikaaz Danielle Boyer. Baawating nindonjibaa. Makwa nindoodem. Hello my relatives. My name is Danielle Boyer. I am an enrolled member of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. I am Bear Clan. I was born and raised in Michigan, raised between both St. Ignace and Troy. I am a youth robotics inventor who seeks to see how we can use technology ethically to preserve our languages.
It Began With Elmo.
When I was little, I spent hours in front of the television watching Sesame Street. My favorite character was Elmo, whose cheerful voice made learning feel like magic. Through him, I learned to sing the alphabet and to ask questions about the world around me. One day in a toy aisle, I discovered a Talking Elmo doll. I’d press his belly, and he repeated the same lessons I had learned on the screen.
He could teach me letters and numbers, but something was missing. Elmo could teach me English. He could not teach me Anishinaabemowin.
Anishinaabemowin, also known as Ojibwemowin, is the language of my people, the Anishinaabe. It is a language spoken across the Great Lakes region of what is now called the United States and Canada. Our language represents an entire worldview: a set of values, place-based knowledge, ancestral memory, and systems of governance and care. It is our ability to communicate about our culture, our ways of life.
It wasn’t just that Elmo didn’t speak it. No toy did. No robot. No software. There were none. The absence was painful, but I did not yet have the words to describe it. What I felt, without understanding the full history behind it, was a deliberate erasure: of my language, my community, and our place in the technologies shaping our futures.
Many years later, while sitting with my mentor and his kids, we imagined a different kind of toy. One that could speak our languages, casually and fluently. One that could live in our homes, talk to our youth, and make language learning accessible and fun. We wondered how different our childhoods might have been if we had heard our language spoken back to us in something we held in our hands just as we heard it spoken by our parents and grandparents. How much more pride we might have felt. How much more confidence.
That idea never left me. It became the spark that led me to create something new: a robot that wouldn’t just talk, but would speak the language of my people. It would become the SkoBot.
Language is resistance
To those of you who have never heard of my language,
Before colonization, millions of Indigenous peoples lived across Turtle Island (North America), speaking hundreds of distinct languages, each with its own grammar, stories, and worldview. Today, many of those languages are severely endangered or erased, with only a handful of fluent speakers remaining. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, fewer than 1 in 10 Indigenous children in the United States spoke a traditional language at home in 2010. The White House Council of Native American Affairs warns that by 2050, fewer than 20 Native languages may remain in active use across the country. UNESCO states that every two weeks, a language is lost globally. For many languages, the window for revitalization is measured in years, not decades.
This loss is not accidental. It is the result of explicit policies of cultural genocide: boarding and residential schools where children were punished often through physical abuse, for speaking their languages, religious and governmental bans on ceremonies and cultural practices, and systematic underfunding and neglect of Tribal education. My own grandmother is the last fluent Anishinaabemowin speaker in my immediate family. When a language disappears from a family, the loss is generational. And it’s fast. We have a responsibility to reclaim it. Language revitalization is an act of survival and refusal. To choose to invest in language is to resist historical and ongoing attempts at erasure.
Now, my sister speaks Anishinaabemowin because she learned it in college. Even though the class was taught on our lands, it was not taught in our dialect. Many of the resources now available are difficult to access or are not culturally accurate. A popular author from my community wrote a book including Anishinaabemowin text and did not include our dialect, but instead used a more popular one, for fear that people would not read her book otherwise due to familiarity. Now, a New York Times Bestseller, I often wonder if what she said was true. Many of the language resources that do exist weren’t created by us or for us. Often, academics step in who have no rooted connection to community and tell us what to do but never help us follow up in the practical use applications. As resources dwindle and we continue to lose fluent speakers due to age and since the COVID-19 pandemic, the fear of losing our language is imminent.
Building the Skobot
In 2021 at the age of 20, I began developing the SkoBot. The SkoBot is a personal, customizable, and interactive language revitalization robot designed for Indigenous youths. The adorable droid senses motion, lights up, and speaks using prerecorded children’s voices from our communities. It sits on the user's shoulder using a wearable strap and is meant to go wherever our youth go.
The robot is not just a toy. It is a pedagogical tool that was co-developed with educators, language keepers, and youth. It was designed to aid our language keepers in the classroom, never replace. The design incorporates Anishinaabe woodland floral motifs, inspired by the animals of our homelands, and each SkoBot is built using recycled materials. We manufacture our custom parts in-house via additive manufacturing to maintain full control over the production process. The robot is free to Indigenous communities and can function without internet access, addressing one of the most common barriers in rural and underfunded tribal communities.
The SkoBot’s speech system does not rely on synthetic voices or large language models. It uses recorded human voices from within the community, ensuring accurate pronunciation, cultural nuance, and dialect preservation. The first version of SkoBot was voiced by my grandmother. Today, many of them are voiced by children, so our youth can hear themselves reflected. The robots accompany culturally relevant language and STEM curriculum and primarily serve Tribal language programs and educators.
The SkoBot was deliberately designed to feel familiar, relational, warm, and personal. The shoulder placement is a design choice that reflects how many of us grew up learning: close to aunties, grandparents, and older siblings who literally leaned in to correct our pronunciation or whisper a new word. The robot is not above the child on a desk looking down, but beside them.
Each community that receives SkoBots helps define what “adorable” and culturally responsible design looks like. In some cases, that means incorporation the design of clan animals, floral designs, or regalia-inspired elements. In others, it means toning down the amount of light or movement for sensory-sensitive students. These design choices are not aesthetic afterthoughts, they are part of signaling to our youth: this technology was built for you.
By embedding SkoBots within existing language programs, classroom routines, and cultural events, the robot becomes a tool that amplifies that is already happening rather then attempting to replace it. Teaching often use the robots to reinforce content introduced in class, to prompt shy students to practice speaking, or to encourage peer learning.
get involved
Here at The STEAM Connection we are a charity and all of our robots are charitable initiatives that go to our youth completely for free. We distribute SkoBots and curriculum through our own classes and also provide them to Tribal schools and Indigenous organizations. We do not sell robots or make money off of them but rather take on our youth initiatives on a need and case-by-case basis, often self-funding these efforts. We created the SkoBot to revitalize our languages in a fun and approachable way for our youth and have seen how well it has been received by our communities. Since then, we've been hard at work to scale manufacturing and technical development to get even more robots into our youths hands.
So for now, SkoBot is a research initiative focused on scaling beyond its first few hundred units and we are currently looking for funding to develop a PCB, implement injection molding, and bring more people onto our team for this initiative. We are looking for strategic partners who want to help make this a reality. You can reach out to our founder and project lead Danielle Boyer at thesteamconnection@gmail.com.
If you are a school or organization who is interested in working with us long-term to implement a SkoBots program through our research initiative, please apply below and we will reach out to find out if we are the right fit. We review applications from organizations and schools every quarter and have a significant lead time due to the volume of our requests and the time that it takes to make a single robot. We will not be reviewing applications from individuals - something that will only be made possible with our goals for scale. We are open for requests for EKGAR (Every Kid Gets a Robot) workshops and workshops for all ages on Indigenous technology, SkoBots, and designing for good.
Due to a recent influx of support and interest and an interest in the development of more languages, we are revamping our application form. Join our email list or send us an email at thesteamconnection@gmail.com to get alerted.
Data sovereignty
Our communities have been taken advantage of by language organizations: we have had our languages copyrighted behind our back, have had our resources misused, and we haven't been listened to regarding our own information. Because of things like this, the development of the SkoBots follows the lead of the communities that we work with regarding their own language information. We will never own recordings, we will never publish them, we will never profit off of them. It will always be up to the discretion of the communities we work with and we always defer to them.
the creators
In the summer of 2020, Dr. Joshuaa Allison-Burbank and our founder Danielle Boyer created the fundraiser Books for Diné Bikéyah to bring Diné books to Diné youth living in Navajo Nation during the pandemic. The fundraiser brought in over $40,000 in donations and was created to provide access to our education no matter what.
Dr. Allison-Burbank is a Developmental Scientist at Johns Hopkins University, a Speech-Language Pathologist, founder of Little Moccasins Educational Services, Author, and Educator. Dr. Allison Burbank and Boyer connected over their love of books. After learning of our founders learning disability, he approached her about pursuing a fellowship in 2020 at the University in Vermont on neurodevelopmental disabilities and mentored her.
Combining Dr. Allison-Burbank's expertise, our mentor Rob Maldonado's design mentorship, and Boyer's work as a robotics inventor, educational activist, and as someone who is working to learn her own language, SkoBots was created for The STEAM Connection! Dr. Allison-Burbank came up with the name SkoBot after skoden and helped come up with uses and applications for the robot. Boyer came up with the cat-like droid design, the wearable interactions, designed the electrical system, and programmed the robot. Maldonado and Boyer created the mechanical design.
Not all of the creators are presently working on the project due to life circumstances and time. Please reach out to The STEAM Connection for official statements, updates, and questions.