April 20, 2025 Deerfield Magazine (pages 56 and 57)

Nothing delights Jack Cooley ’84 more than seeing children simultaneously learning and having fun. He is particularly enthusiastic about witnessing young women discover the joys of STEM, a mission he pursues as co-founder and executive director of The Community Bots, a program whose mission is to support learning in STEM robotics for young women and their teachers in underserved communities around the world.

Currently head of the science and engineering department at the Allen-Stevenson School, a private, all-boys K-8 school in New York City, Cooley previously taught at the independent, all-girls Chapin School, where his determination to stimulate young women’s interests in STEM was born.

Shortly after arriving at Chapin, explains Cooley, he was asked to lead a new robotics program. Upon enrolling in a teacher training program at Tufts, he was surprised to discover his classmates were all male. “I remember one person telling me, ‘Girls just aren’t going to be into this,’ a statement which surprised me.”

Around the same time, he continues, he attended a Chapin faculty presentation on gender equity in play given by MIT Biology Professor Nancy Hopkins. “She told us, ‘The push for equality must start with middle and high school faculty like you. Unconscious biases are planted in minds at an early age, so you need to start encouraging these girls to seek equity now.'” For Cooley, the message, coupled with his training experience, was inspirational. “It gave me the internal push I needed to start advocating for girls in STEM,” he says.

After launching Chapin’s robotics program and guiding it to numerous successes, Cooley realized he was onto something. “I really enjoyed orchestrating educational experiences for my students that involved a lot of agency and creativity,” he explains. “I saw the girls having fun without realizing they were also learning. Seeing them brainstorming, collaborating, and inventing was incredible, and I realized I wanted to do more to breach the gender gap in STEM.”

So, in 2014, he and fellow STEM educator Ana Agón co-founded The Community Bots. Launched in New York, the program now serves eight sites in five countries: Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Nicaragua, and the United States, and continues to expand. “We did a one-off program in Spain, and we hope to launch a program in Costa Rica with the help of a corporate sponsor,” Cooley enthuses. “I would also like to scale up here in New York.”

The premise of The Community Bots is simple: provide academic and socio-economic support to young women interested in engineering so that they can pursue higher education and careers in STEM fields. The organization works together with host schools and/or nonprofit partners to create STEM robotics programs in local communities. Asked how partner communities in other countries are identified, Cooley says that it’s largely word of mouth. “Our countries chose us… someone familiar with our program knows someone in the country and the conversation begins.”

Programs are developed in stages over a series of years. Once a partner is identified, facilitators and key administrators participate in a virtual training program and co-lead a student course. Training continues remotely over several years, in preparation for in-person training subsequently administered by The Community Bots trainers at the partner site. These trainers also deliver donated equipment, laptops, and curriculum materials to the partner site and ensure that local teachers have the training and resources to enroll their students in a robotics competition within one year.

As students progress through their education, The Community Bots continues to supply remote support and assist the partner site in creating a STEM-robotics center where secondary school students can continue their education, prepare for college, seek STEM-related internships, and work with women mentors from the academic and private sectors. “In many respects, we’re consultants,” observes Cooley. “We’re not on the ground in our partner countries full time, at least not yet, so we always try to partner with nonprofits who have established relationships with schools or after-school programs.”

Although delighted by the program’s growth, Cooley admits much work remains. “It took a while, but we’ve managed to create a wonderful board that’s representative of what we do,” he observes. “Now we’re working to bolster our cadre of women mentors because research shows that STEM experience, when coupled with strong mentorship, has real effects.”

Fellow Deerfield graduate David Kinsley ’84 is among those who serve on The Community Bots Advisory Board. As the president of Kinsley Group, an energy solutions company based in the Northeast, he has seen firsthand the need for more women in STEM. “There’s a dearth of females in our industry,” says Kinsley. “It’s starting to change, but there’s much to be done. The Community Bots is a beautiful, brilliant way to break down the gender barriers that currently exist in STEM professions.” Learning is best through experience, and seeing these young women having fun and realizing victories in the realm is so encouraging,” continues Kinsley. “And there’s no substitute for having these experiences at an early age.”

Inspired by his affiliation with The Community Bots, Kinsley says he would love to see more fellow Deerfield graduates involved with the organization. “What The Community Bots needs most is engaged supporters, people who can help Jack leverage his vision and passion for this work,” Kinsley asserts. “I would encourage alums from Deerfield to get involved, whether through work or wealth, particularly those working in STEM fields. The research shows that more young women pursue careers in STEM when they have positive role models, particularly at an early age.”

Cooley concurs. “I would love to hear from members of the Deerfield community who would like to get involved with The Community Bots. There’s room for all sorts of commitments, from working with our junior or advisory boards to mentoring or sitting on our board of directors. Enthusiasm and excitement displayed by the girls as they build robots, enter competitions, and meet with success are infectious. Jack and I both have daughters, and we’re committed to supporting equalization of opportunities in this sector—the more diversity, the better.

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, School of  Public Health and Health Sciences. May 1, 2024  Alumni Jack Cooley ‘96MS and Bob Hall ‘95MS are on a mission to empower young women across the world. As co-founder and board member of The Community Bots, a nonprofit organization that provides training and equipment in STEM robotics for young women and their teachers in underserved communities, they are seeking to develop the next generation of engineers and scientists – no matter their circumstances.

“We feel like we need to develop pathways,” says Cooley, who earned his master’s degree in Nutrition from UMass Amherst. “When the girls we serve ultimately go into STEM fields, they will go back to mentor younger girls. That will turn into relationship building, which will turn into careers, and even building their own companies.”

After working in international development, Cooley joined several public relations firms focused on pharmaceutical products. The work left him unfulfilled, however, and he soon made a life-altering career choice—he landed a job as a science and engineering teacher. It was here that he developed a passion for STEM and robotics.

“I was often told that I would be a great school teacher since I had done a lot of community education in college and while working in international development,” he explains. “I decided to give teaching a try for one school year, and I am still an administrator and teacher 25 years later.”

The inspiration for The Community Bots began when Cooley was coaching a robotics team at The Chapin School, an all-girls school in New York City. He noticed the gender gap among the teams competing and wanted to find ways to involve more girls in robotics and other STEM fields. As time went on, the robotics equipment the school was using became outdated and replaced by newer equipment. Not wanting to throw out and waste the older robots, Cooley set out to find a way to donate them.

“At the school we had a guest speaker from MIT,” explains Cooley. “She talked about the power of giving girls in early middle school positive experiences in tech. She also said that mentoring is critical in order to bridge the STEM gap in the future. Her words were so powerful. That was the spark. That’s when we knew we had to do something with the equipment.”

Cooley partnered with Ana Agón, a Spanish language teacher and early childhood educator who shared a background in technology and Cooley’s passion for global education and social justice, to found The Community Bots. Together, they recruited a board of directors to help grow their passion project. Cooley thought of Bob Hall, a friend since their time at Amherst together, and invited him to join the board and to administer the board’s data collection.

When asked why he chose to join the team, Hall’s answer is simple. “This is a great opportunity to give back to the community.”

With a master’s degree in epidemiology from UMass Amherst and years of experience working for the Veteran Affairs Boston Healthcare System as an informatics/data analytics scientist, Hall was a perfect organizational fit. He has helped to guide the student and teacher survey analysis since the project’s second year. He brings with him experience employing Artificial Intelligence in medical research to improve health outcomes for veterans as well as years of experience in public health, epidemiology, medical writing, and data analytics that support research innovation in healthcare.

“We want to level the playing field,” explains Hall. “We want to expose these girls to STEM, robotics, and programming so they can take those skills and continue to grow and develop them and use them to get into higher education. We want to empower these young women to get into the tech sector. We know that is an area that is growing with AI and data analytics.”

Since 2016, The Community Bots program has trained 500 young female engineers, donated 200 refurbished laptops and 80,000 LEGO pieces and ancillary LEGO robotics equipment, trained 100 teachers to run STEM-robotics programs, and established continuing programs in four countries (Colombia, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua) and established a pilot program in a fifth (Spain). The Community Bots will introduce their program to schools in the United States next. They will launch their program at The Bronx Charter School for the Arts in New York City in summer 2024.

When I started the middle-school robotics program at the Chapin School, an all-girls school in New York, it became pretty apparent that stereotypical assumptions that girls weren’t really interested in building robots, using coding programs or competing in coding contests were incorrect.

Five years after we started, we had a top team in the First Lego League robotics competition. With only female participants, those teams would later go on to compete against international teams. When the boys told them that an all-girls team could not win, the female students stepped up to the challenge and relished the idea of proving those naysayers wrong. My school purchased the CoderZ online learning platform for coding virtual and real robots in my classroom and virtually. I also aid academic and social-emotional support providers as they help girls pursue higher education and STEM careers through the nonprofit I co-founded, Community Bots. Here are five ways that an online coding program has helped us teach STEM to girls in the classroom, remotely and around the world:

1. No equipment needed

You don’t need all the very expensive equipment and the challenges of training teachers to use real robotics; many programs can be self-taught. We’re going to be training teachers in Colombia over the next two months via self-paced learning through modules, for example, and also are running a robotics training with them in person.

2. Gets girls started in STEM early

We want to provide girls with positive computer science experiences early on to bridge the gender gap in computer science and engineering. In computer science, the numbers are quite low for undergraduate degrees — sometimes around 5:1 (boys to girls). When you get to the doctoral level — and especially for women of color — the numbers are even lower (often just 2% or 3% female). The evidence supports that when girls are in elementary and middle school, they need positive role modeling and the hands-on experience of doing the coding. Those experiences also have to be fun, engaging and linked to a positive social outcome in the students’ lives in order to specifically capture girls’ attention and commitment to the field.

3. Coding program builds confidence

Girls who learn coding at a young age realize that their gender’s low representation on teams, in classrooms and at board meetings does not have to impede their dreams or hold them back. The girls who spend two years in high school on a winning, male-dominated robotics team will carry that level of confidence and sense of achievement with them through their entire lives. When they go to the competition, our girls feel like they are entitled to win it — just like the boys do.

4. Prepares students for the future

A good coding program provides transferable skills that align with other, more advanced coding skills, be it Python or another real-world coding language that people use in the workplace. Anytime we can help make those connections, we help bring STEM to life for girls. For example, the newer language that Lego uses is Scratch-based, and students love it because they can create animations and games for each other. Then, they get into the coding program and are using the same language to make a robot move. This makes the experience of education more powerful and relevant for students.

5. Gets teachers comfortable with robotics

Some coding platforms also make STEM instruction more accessible to teachers who may not have robotics or coding experience. Teachers generally like the accessibility of an online coding program that doesn’t require them to have any advanced training initially, because coding and robotics can be pretty intimidating if you don’t have a technical background. If you are trying to bring coding to a community that lacks resources, an educational coding program can help you reach a wide audience of kids or adults and give them a taste of what coding is like in a fun gaming environment. The best part is that students have so much fun, they don’t even realize they are learning.

Jack Cooley, formerly a teacher at the Chapin School, now is a teacher at the Allen-Stevenson School in New York and co-founder of the Community Bots nonprofit. Chapin and Community Bots use the CoderZ program.  Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own. 

Amazon unveiled its first fully autonomous mobile robot that can move heavy carts and work safely alongside humans. The company says the robot will help address safety concerns, but it comes as Amazon faces a labor crisis and several unionization effort from warehouse workers.

A team of UCLA engineers and their colleagues have developed a new design strategy and 3D printing technique to build robots in one single step.

A study that outlined the advance, along with the construction and demonstration of an assortment of tiny robots that walk, maneuver and jump, was published in Science today.

The breakthrough enabled the entire mechanical and electronic systems needed to operate a robot to be manufactured all at once by a new type of 3D printing process for engineered active materials with multiple functions (also known as metamaterials). Once 3D printed, a “meta-bot” will be capable of propulsion, movement, sensing and decision-making.

The printed metamaterials consist of an internal network of sensory, moving and structural elements and can move by themselves following programmed commands. With the internal network of moving and sensing already in place, the only external component needed is a small battery to power the robot.

“We envision that this design and printing methodology of smart robotic materials will help realize a class of autonomous materials that could replace the current complex assembly process for making a robot,” said Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng.

“We envision that this design and printing methodology of smart robotic materials will help realize a class of autonomous materials that could replace the current complex assembly process for making a robot,” said the study’s principal investigator Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “With complex motions, multiple modes of sensing and programmable decision-making abilities all tightly integrated, it’s similar to a biological system with the nerves, bones and tendons working in tandem to execute controlled motions.”

The team demonstrated the integration with an on-board battery and controller for the fully autonomous operation of the 3D printed robots — each at the size of a finger nail. According to Zheng, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, the methodology could lead to new designs for biomedical robots, such as self-steering endoscopes or tiny swimming robots, which can emit ultrasounds and navigate themselves near blood vessels to deliver drug doses at specific target sites inside the body.

These “meta-bots” can also explore hazardous environments. In a collapsed building, for example, a swarm of such tiny robots armed with integrated sensing parts could quickly access confined spaces, assess threat levels and help rescue efforts by finding people trapped in the rubble.

Rayne Research Group/UCLA
UCLA-developed “meta-bots” demonstrate their flexibility and abilities to navigate tough terrain and avoid obstacles

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Most robots, no matter their size, are typically built in a series of complex manufacturing steps that integrate the limbs, electronic and active components. The process results in heavier weights, bulkier volumes and reduced force output compared to robots that could be built using this new method.

The key in the UCLA-led, all-in-one method is the design and printing of piezoelectric metamaterials — a class of intricate lattice materials that can change shape and move in response to an electric field or create electrical charge as a result of physical forces.

The use of active materials that can translate electricity to motions is not new. However, these materials generally have limits in their range of motion and distance of travel. They also need to be connected to gearbox-like transmission systems in order to achieve desired motions.

By contrast, the UCLA-developed robotic materials — each the size of a penny — are composed of intricate piezoelectric and structural elements that are designed to bend, flex, twist, rotate, expand or contract at high speeds.

The team also presented a methodology to design these robotic materials so users could make their own models and print the materials into a robot directly.

“This allows actuating elements to be arranged precisely throughout the robot for fast, complex and extended movements on various types of terrain,” said the study’s lead author Huachen Cui.

“This allows actuating elements to be arranged precisely throughout the robot for fast, complex and extended movements on various types of terrain,” said the study’s lead author Huachen Cui, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in Zheng’s Additive Manufacturing and Metamaterials Laboratory. “With the two-way piezoelectric effect, the robotic materials can also self-sense their contortions, detect obstacles via echoes and ultrasound emissions, as well as respond to external stimuli through a feedback control loop that determines how the robots move, how fast they move and toward which target they move.”

Using the technique, the team built and demonstrated three “meta-bots” with different capabilities. One robot can navigate around S-shaped corners and randomly placed obstacles, another can escape in response to a contact impact, while the third robot could walk over rough terrain and even make small jumps.

Other UCLA authors of the study are graduate students Desheng Yao, Ryan Hensleigh, Zhenpeng Xu and Haotian Lu; postdoctoral scholar Ariel Calderon; development engineering associate Zhen Wang. Additional authors are Sheyda Davaria, a research associate at Virginia Tech; Patrick Mercier, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego; and Pablo Tarazaga, a professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University.

The research was supported by a Young Faculty Award and a Director’s Fellowship Award from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with additional funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

The advance incorporates 3D printing techniques previously developed by Zheng and Hensleigh while both were researchers at Virginia Tech, which holds the patent. The researchers plan to file an additional patent through the UCLA Technology Development Group for the new methodology developed at UCLA.

A lifeguard drone saved the life of a 14-year-old caught in a powerful tide off a beach in Valencia, Spain, moments before rescue crews arrived.

When NASA’s Perseverance vehicle arrived this Thursday on the surface of Mars, it not only achieved a space milestone but also fulfilled the dream of a Colombian. Caleña Diana Trujillo arrived alone in the United States at the age of 17, without knowing English, $ 300 in her pocket, and a clear first objective: not to starve.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/diana-trujillo-nasa-mars-rover-perseverance/