Meet Danielle Boyer: Youth Robotics Designer & Ethical Tech Advocate
Boozhoo (hello)! Danielle Boyer is an Indigenous (Anishinaabe – Enrolled Sault Tribe) youth robotics inventor and advocate exploring how emerging technologies can be ethically used to safeguard Indigenous cultures and languages. The Anishinaabeg are one of the largest Indigenous people groups in North America, residing across the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, where their language, Anishinaabemowin, is endangered. In 2019, Danielle founded The STEAM Connection, a youth-led nonprofit that has provided over one million young people worldwide with free, culturally grounded technical education through robotics.
She is best known for designing the SkoBots, wearable AI-powered personal robots that teach Anishinaabemowin using community-authored data, locally run systems, and frameworks rooted in Indigenous data sovereignty. Her work addresses global challenges of ethical AI, language extinction, and equitable access to emerging technologies. Danielle has spoken at the White House, UNESCO Headquarters, and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Recognized as a National Geographic Young Explorer, Echoing Green Fellow, and two-time MIT Solve Fellow, her life and work were featured in an MIT Solve documentary that won a Webby Award, Sundance Brand Storytelling Award, Tribeca X Award, and a SXSW feature.
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My story
About Me
About Me
22-year-old robotics inventor is on a mission to make technology accessible to Indigenous youth.
The Big Idea Trailer
22-year-old Ojibwe robotics inventor promotes tech education among Indigenous youth
Preserving indigenous language with robots
It Began with Elmo
When I was little, I used to sit cross-legged in front of the television, glued to Sesame Street. My favorite character was Elmo. He was a cheerful red little monster that made learning feel like magic. Through the screen, I learned how to sing the alphabet and how to ask questions about the world around me. While looking at the toy aisle at the store one day, I saw a Talking Elmo toy. He would talk when you pressed his belly and teach you the same things I had learned on TV.
Something struck me, though. Elmo could teach me so many things, like numbers and letters. But he couldn’t teach me Anishinaabemowin. This is a language spoken by the Anishinaabe, an Indigenous people in the Great Lakes region of Turtle Island, also known as North America. Anishinaabemowin is a member of the Algonquian language family, and it has several dialects that are spoken across the United States and Canada. It is also known as Ojibwemowin.
It is also my people, my language.
It wasn’t just that Elmo didn’t speak it. No toy did. No robot. No software. That absence wasn’t just disappointing to me, it was a reflection of something deeper. The erasure of our languages, our knowledge systems, and our identities from the tools and technologies shaping the future.
Many years later, while sitting with my Acoma Pueblo mentor and his kids Kaleb and Kateri, 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.