109: Bringing Data to life in the Classroom with Databot's CEO, Robert Grover

Holly Owens (00:02):

Hello everyone, and welcome to another amazing episode of Edup Ed Tech. My name is Holly Owens

DaNadia Johnson (00:10):

And my name is Nadia Johnson, and we're your Hosts

Holly Owens (00:14):

And we're super pumped. We have a great guest with us today. We have Robert Groover, who is the C e O of DataBot joining us, so welcome to the show, Robert.

Robert Grover (00:27):

Hey, thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to share the DataBot story.

Holly Owens (00:31):

Yeah, we're looking forward to it too. Nadie and I were just talking, we're like, we can't wait to hear more about it. Typically we do just a little bit of research because we want that authentic reaction to all the things that you're saying. But we're excited to have you here. But before we jump into all the things, DataBot, why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey, Robert, how'd you come to become the C e O of DataBot?

Robert Grover (00:55):

Well, I started in STEM education with my wife actually over 30 years ago before it was even called stem. I graduated college with degrees in English, in creative writing, and then also with a degree in business management and fresh out of school, I was recruited by a small business incubator that was involved with a afterschool program. It was literally a, what I call a rogue educator teaching out of his garage, and he was introducing kids to crazy things like Lego robotics and electronics and engineering, and a lot of the computer programs at that time, he was doing computer graphics, 3D animations, a lot of things in 1988 that were really cutting edge for kids. So I got recruited to go to this program and see if I could help document what he was doing, and the idea was from these investors and this incubator was to try to replicate that and do a franchise across the country. So that's really how I got started. I didn't start out as an educator, but I ended up loving working with kids and working in this environment and ended up spending 30 years with that company, developing STEM programs, teaching kids, and loving ed tech.

Holly Owens (02:18):

Oh, I love that story. And it sounds very like Bill ish working out of the garage and doing different things on the outside, kind of going rogue in this situation, and you worked for them for 30 years. That's amazing.

Robert Grover (02:35):

Yeah, it was a great company. We developed a lot of programs and products. My wife actually volunteered with me when we started working for that company and worked with me for many years through that company, off and on. She left work for quite a while raising our kids, but then came back and did it again in 2018. We left that company and started DataBot. We took everything we had learned and all the programs that we had done and poured it all into this remarkable new product that's available now.

DaNadia Johnson (03:10):

That's awesome. I know that you said your wife was with you along this journey, but I want to know who inspired you along this journey

Robert Grover (03:20):

Over 30 years? Probably too many to list.

DaNadia Johnson (03:24):

Yeah,

Robert Grover (03:27):

I'd have to put my wife actually at the top of that list because she was probably the most dedicated and sincere educator I've ever seen. I mean, to this day, we still have kids that she taught that now have their own kids that continue to reach out to us and tell us how much she impacted their lives. So she was a natural STEM educator from day one, and a lot of the quality of the product and the experience for teachers, I think comes from her. That's

DaNadia Johnson (04:00):

Awesome. I know that being from that education background and learning from that perspective, you're able to really kind of bring that knowledge. So it seems like she really brought that knowledge to what you've built with That's awesome.

Robert Grover (04:20):

Yeah, there's no doubt she really has helped define the product. I'm kind of the technology guy. I don't have a degree in engineering, but it seems like 30 years of STEM have given me a lot of expertise

Holly Owens (04:32):

That counts. You should have a degree

Robert Grover (04:35):

That counts to me.

Holly Owens (04:37):

I don't understand why you have 10 plus years and something I consider you at least at the expert level. Expert. Absolutely. So Robert, you've been in this game for quite a bit, working for a previous company and now having DataBot. How would you personally go about defining educational technology?

Robert Grover (05:00):

I think that's a great question because we actually used to teach that as one of the first things when we were introducing it to teachers and parents and kids. Technology is just a tool, and it just depends on whether it's a simple tool like a pencil or an advanced tool like DataBot. Technology is there to help you solve problems, make your life easier, execute tasks. But technology today has such a wide variety of definitions, everything from virtual reality and software to robotics hardware. So I think if you boil it down to something very simple, it's a tool that's going to help you accomplish something.

Holly Owens (05:50):

Oh, I love it. Straight to the point.

DaNadia Johnson (05:52):

Absolutely. Yeah,

Holly Owens (05:54):

And I love it that you're saying it's a tool to help you. I think lots of people today are getting scared by ai, maybe data bots, what's happening in the background and figuring out how to navigate their way. And really it's just a tool. It's a resource that you implement and use to make things better. Enhance the learning experience, for sure.

DaNadia Johnson (06:15):

Yeah, make things easier a little bit. So now we're kind of getting into this part of the episode where we want to learn more about DataBot and what this product brings to students and educators within the education space.

Robert Grover (06:32):

Yeah, so let me give you a little backstory on where DataBot came from. One of the last projects that my wife and I worked on actually at that former company, was deploying STEM Labs, and it was in an organization overseas, and they were deploying these labs for the first time into schools with teachers that had never used this kind of technology. They were very used to stand and deliver pedantic type teaching methods. The type of things that we were introducing them to with do it yourself, makerspace type activities was completely foreign. And unfortunately, the organization that was deploying these labs did not allocate adequate time for professional development or getting people comfortable with those tools. So we deployed these beautiful labs. They were rich with technology, engineering, programming, robotics, life science kits, three D printers, you name it. They had spent the money on the equipment and the tools, and they were first rate, but the teachers were literally scared of this equipment because it was just so much technology, such a high learning curve just to learn the equipment.

(07:52):

And then beyond that, of course, it's a completely new pedagogy. So the labs are beautiful, they're still there, but I talked to some people just a few weeks ago, and they're still not being used very extensively because they just have not allocated the time for professional development and getting people to embrace the technology. Anyway, we walked away from that with a long list of criteria that we said, well, you've got all of these teachers around the world that are interested in learning and doing STEM type approaches in their classroom, but they don't want to do it if they have a learning curve of 500 hours to get it done. So what we did is came up with a device that literally satisfied a criteria list of about 27 points. It had to be something that was friendly, something that was easy to learn and use something that was wide ranging through all of the different grade bands.

(08:51):

We have people using data bot from grades two and three, clear through university example. It's a device that can be used for teaching all the core sciences. So you can literally teach physics, life science, biology, earth science, environmental science with it, but then you can also expand into some rich technology topics like coding, physical computing with it. We actually have people doing machine learning, edge computing, all kinds of things with this simple device. So it's turned out to be extremely successful because of that versatility. So yeah, that's really the backstory on DataBot. We wanted something that was scalable, and it's very small. Can't show it to you on an audio podcast, but it's small enough. Oh, would It be linked in the show notes? I promise people will be able to go out and look

Holly Owens (09:45):

At it. Looking at it right now, it's pretty cool.

Robert Grover (09:48):

Great. No, it's small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It's like, oh, about an inch and a quarter on a side, and then three quarters of an inch tall, so very light, 34 grams. It's small enough to actually be packed by a drone. Lots of people using drones in the classroom put a data bot on board and record data, just to give you a simple definition of it, it's a multi-sensor device with built-in physical computing attributes, so it's got lights and sound. So you've got 15 sensors on board, all of which you can interact with through motion or sound or light or gases that surround you. And then you can also use it to control external devices. So it's basically a robot and a little tiny package, and it gives you the freedom to do all kinds of activities. We have people launching it on rockets, flying it on drones, launching it with catapults, dancing with it, doing all kinds of explorations of chemistry, temperature, and it's really inexpensive. It's $189 and here to four to do probeware with that many sensors would've cost you five to 10 times that

Holly Owens (11:02):

Price. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, it's really, yeah, and it's really, I can't only imagine how much this is exploding in some of the science courses within

DaNadia Johnson (11:10):

The K

Holly Owens (11:10):

Through 12.

DaNadia Johnson (11:11):

I'm

Holly Owens (11:12):

Thinking about all the things that I used to do and I'm like, oh, we were excited to put batteries in something and test the batteries. I don't even remember something in fourth grade and test the effectiveness of batteries. But this sounds unbelievable.

DaNadia Johnson (11:29):

I bet students Love to use it. It seems fun.

Robert Grover (11:33):

Yeah, that was one of the intentions was to make it approachable and friendly, and it really is. I mean, it's got to R G B LEDs built into it, so it lights up and all kinds of beautiful colors. You can code it to have a personality. So for example, you might want to train your data bot to respond to when you breathe on it, what's it going to do? It can chortle at you and turn blue. What happens when you throw it in the air? It might squeal and turn red. That's awesome.

DaNadia Johnson (12:01):

That's

Holly Owens (12:01):

So

DaNadia Johnson (12:01):

Cool.

Holly Owens (12:03):

That's so cool idea. Yeah. What are some of the, I was going to ask you? No, go ahead. I'll ask you after you finish your thought. I

Robert Grover (12:11):

Was just going to say the whole idea is to get kids physically interacting with data because it's a data powered world,

DaNadia Johnson (12:18):

They

Robert Grover (12:18):

Have to understand how to collect, interpret, analyze, and use data to solve problems. So what better way to get them comfortable with data than physically interacting with data on a regular basis? Yeah,

Holly Owens (12:32):

I was going to ask you what are some of the favorite ways that you've seen people, your favorite ways, people using data bot in the classroom and higher ed or just in any situation that you've been there and they're using, you're like, oh, I didn't expect this. It sounds like a lot of different things have come out of it. Maybe this was the goal of Data Bot, but now people are using it for a variety of different other things.

Robert Grover (12:56):

Yeah. I'll give you a couple of examples of activities that kids do and a couple of extrapolations that came from educators that were doing these things. One of the activities that we use DataBot four to introduce concepts of acceleration and acceleration due to Gravity is a project called Ninja Physics. And Ninja physics is a lot of fun because as you might expect, kids are going to be moving like ninjas and learning about acceleration and gravity. Now, the interesting thing about DataBot is that you get to visualize all these invisible forces that are around us all the time. We're surrounded by gases and pressure and things like gravity that are pulling down on us at all times, but we can't really see those. We just acclimate to them and just, you don't really think about it. Data bot allows you to actually see those things. So the first activity in ninja physics, for example, kids put data bot in the palm of their hand and they activate the app.

(14:00):

It connects by Bluetooth, so it's wireless. So wireless is great because you can toss these things around and there's no cables or anything, but you connect to it by Bluetooth. You start streaming the data, and students can look at the data and they can see as they hold it in their hand that it's displaying 9.8 meters per second squared, which of course is the gravitational constant for Earth. And they notice that, okay, if I rotate DataBot upright, it shifts gravity to another axis. So you can actually visualize the three D axes of DataBot. So it's introducing kids, first of all to gravity and the gravity constant, and then it's also introducing them to three D Cartesian coordinates. So they explore it in this freeform activity, they rotate it up right, left, they see the X, Y, Z axes. And then the next activity is called a steady hand where it actually times them.

(14:58):

So students compete to see who can get the highest score, and they're trying to hold it perfectly level on the Z axis and getting 9.8 meters per second squared over a ten second data set. And I will tell you, the kids never forget 9.8 meters per second squared, and already they're becoming familiar and really comfortable with data because it's visualizing in a graph. It's also showing you the numbers. So these kinds of activities where kids are physically interacting with the data or fantastic because it's fun, it's gamified and it's real. It's showing you real data that surrounds you. And that's just one example. Now, an extrapolation of that, we have a teacher in North Carolina that did some really crazy stuff with acceleration, and he created an activity series called Dancing with the Data, and he straps data bots to kids. He has a three D printed holder that he puts it inside and then they use a band to attach it to their chest. And then he has kids visualize different dance moves, and they have to try to replicate and match graphs based on acceleration. So that's a great example of a creative teacher that has really taken the idea of visualizing motion data and taking it to something really fun that the kids love. He's posted a lot of videos of teachers and kids dancing with the data.

Holly Owens (16:24):

That's so awesome. A little spinoff of Dancing with the Stars, dancing with the data.

DaNadia Johnson (16:28):

I like it.

Holly Owens (16:29):

Anything related to pop culture that they get makes it relevant. Yeah,

DaNadia Johnson (16:35):

I love that. So without giving away too much or we don't want you violating any NDAs or anything for secrets that you have coming up, but what is on the roadmap for the upcoming year, what may be new exciting things or goals does DataBot have for the product?

Robert Grover (17:01):

So many things. The product, as I said, is I look at it as an open platform for innovation really. So out of the box, it's super easy to use. With this app I was describing, it'll connect by Bluetooth, you scan a QR code and lessons are pre-configured. So I have to do is tap an icon and you're streaming data and the lessons are right there. So super easy to use out of the box and lots and lots of things you can do in all of the sciences with just the core experiments. Now, beyond that, in terms of technology, we've already done lots of things with interoperability with other platforms. So you can attach DataBot, for example, to a Sphero R V R and take control of that little tracked robot. So now you've got a mobile robotic system that can use all of the sensing capabilities of DataBot, but it's now mobile.

(17:55):

So we're continuing to expand all of those interoperability pieces. For example, we released a curriculum around Lego robotics last quarter, and it's been really popular. It takes Lego spike, prime robots, and we have our own builds where you integrate data bots and we have missions that are all career-based. So students work in teams where one student, for example, will be the engineer, another student will be the data scientist, and they solve problems together. So a lot of what's on our roadmap is to continuing to intertwine with other systems. We want it to be able to work with Vex, for example. We started that this quarter. We want to be able to integrate with just about anything. And then beyond that, we're working with a company, it's an organization, a nonprofit that has created Micro blocks, which is a fantastic coding environment. I don't know if you're familiar with Micro Blocks, but one of the founders and lead architects of Scratch has founded Micro Blocks specifically for physical computing.

(19:04):

So it's a fantastic environment for maintaining engagement with kids, but it's also remarkable for interoperability. It allows us to connect to all kinds of other things. So internet of things, for example, you can put Data bot out on a network, program it with micro blocks and broadcast all of your greenhouse data, for example, into the cloud. Some other interesting things, augmented reality, virtual reality, streaming live sensor data into augmented reality apps. So for example, you would be able to just point your phone at DataBot and visualize all of the different data points that are happening around it. You'd be able to see gas levels and all kinds of Things. That's

Holly Owens (19:47):

So cool. That's so cool. When you started describing it, the first, and this is going to date me in my age, the first thing that came to my head is I think of the movie Twister when they're trying to get, have you seen the movie Twister when they're trying to get data from the tornadoes and they call it Dorothy, and they have these little sensors that they need to get up into the tornado. And that's what I envisioned when you first started describing Data Bot as getting that information. Like now it's real time. That movie came back out in the nineties, but that is so cool what you're doing. And they could just see it instantaneously with the gases and the Gravity. Don't know, I was a biology minor, so I did at one point want to teach science. So this is very intriguing to me.

Robert Grover (20:40):

Yeah, I've had more than one person actually bring up Twister. It looks so long, those devices. So it's fantastic that way. And yeah, we've had data bots sent up on high powered rockets, high altitude balloon launches, so it's been up to about a hundred thousand feet collecting data.

Holly Owens (21:00):

Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. That's so cool. So you've worked in the industry before and now you have DataBot and you're doing all these different things and getting all these different people doing this and pushing it to that. And I like what you have coming up on your roadmap. So we're coming up here on the end of the episode and we definitely want to leave it open for you to come back and tell us what's going on in the next six to 12 months. We love doing, where are they now episodes. So final two questions for you, Robert. Is there anything that we missed, anything else you'd like to share? And then we want to know from you and from your perspective and experiences, what does the future of Ed Tech look like? So anything we missed and what does the future look like?

Robert Grover (21:48):

Well, I think in a short podcast, that's probably about the most we can pack in there about data.

Holly Owens (21:55):

Absolutely.

Robert Grover (21:56):

And we want people

Holly Owens (21:57):

To go out and we want them to explore it. We want them to see it and order it and use it.

Robert Grover (22:02):

Exactly. Yep. No, I'd love to share more specifics about it. Just so many different ways people are using it around the world. But I think we covered a really good chunk of it to get people at least aware that it exists. And then in terms of the future, I think the biggest thing that everybody's talking about now, of course, is artificial intelligence. And it's obviously going to transform everything. We use it daily for all kinds of things, ranging from helping to align standards to activities, to helping to answer questions about technology. We can even crank out code that can work with DataBot using artificial intelligence, or even looking at ways to create DataBot capabilities where it can actually interact with an AI engine and answer questions for you, what's the temperature outside? And then it could actually tell you things about that. But I think you had mentioned this right at the beginning, Holly, that AI isn't something we should be afraid of. It's something that I think everybody needs to be aware of, and they need to embrace understanding what it can do because it's just another tool. And if we've got educators and kids afraid to use it or parents terrified to use it, then that's doing everybody a disservice. So the best way forward I think, is to embrace it, learn about it, understand it, and help guide it to make sure it is a positive thing.

Holly Owens (23:29):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Robert, we can't thank you enough for taking the time to come on, add up Ed Tech and tell us all about DataBot. And everything about DataBot is obviously going to be linked in our show notes, where to connect with you, where to go out to your website to learn more about Bot and getting it into your own classroom, into your, whatever that is in K to 12 higher ed adult learning. So thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us.

Robert Grover (23:55):

Yeah, I really appreciate you having me. This was a lot of fun to meet both of you. Yeah,

DaNadia Johnson (23:59):

Thank you.

Holly Owens (24:00):

Thank you.