Hands on the robot, not hands in the air.

Most robotics outreach puts one robot in front of fifty students. The students in the front row get a memory; everyone else gets a view. These workshops invert that. Each session seats four students, two per robot, working directly with Aiden and Rose for the full session. Nobody watches from the back, because there is no back.

Sessions run roughly ninety minutes, and a visit can include multiple sessions in a day, so a school can rotate two or three small groups through in one afternoon. While students wait their turn, LOOI, the Initiative's small desktop companion robot, holds court. He is not a workstation. He is the reason nobody minds the wait.

The workshop assumes no prior experience with programming or robotics. If a student can edit a text file, they can do everything the session asks of them. That is the point.

1. Meet Aiden and Rose. A short working demonstration: conversation, vision, personality. Long enough to raise the question the rest of the session answers: how does this actually work?
2. Read the mind. Students open the actual instruction files that define each robot's personality and behavior. No simulation, no simplified sandbox. The real file, in plain English, on the real robot.
3. Rewrite the personality. Working in pairs, students draft a new persona, load it, and talk to what they made. A pirate, a poet, a sports announcer. The robot becomes whoever they wrote.
4. Under the hood. A guided look at the robot's backend: how the language model connects, what the tools do, where the camera and microphone feed in, and what is and is not stored. Demystification is the deliverable.
5. Debrief. If a personality is just a text file, what does that tell you about the AI you use every day? The session closes by connecting the hands-on work to the habits of the AI-Epistemic Resilience framework.

Students leave having programmed a robot's behavior, seen the machinery behind an AI's confidence, and, for many, discovered that the barrier they assumed existed does not.

The Initiative currently operates two Reachy Mini robots, which sets today's session size at four students, two per robot. We would rather tell you that plainly than promise a scale we cannot deliver. The ratio is the strength of the format: every student in the room spends the session with their hands on a robot.

The roadmap is arithmetic. Every Reachy Mini added to the fleet adds two seats to every future workshop. At ten robots, sessions grow to twenty students, which is where we intend to hold the line; past that, the workshop becomes the lecture it was built to replace.

The format funds its own growth. Workshop fees go directly toward expanding the fleet, so each booked session helps put more robots on the table for the sessions that follow, and a school planning a larger visit can grow the program simply by scheduling it. Donations accelerate the same arithmetic: a sponsored robot is not an abstraction, it is two more chairs at the table, at every workshop, for the life of the hardware.

Sponsor a robot, add two seats →

Audience

• Built for grades seven through twelve; adaptable for informal science venues with mixed ages.
• Sessions currently start at four students, growing with the fleet toward a twenty-student maximum. Multiple sessions per visit are encouraged.
• Pairs well with the Smart Tools, Sharper Minds talk: the talk for the whole audience, workshops for small groups afterward.

Requirements

• A quiet room with a table and seating for four students plus the robots. The robots listen through their own microphones, so loud open spaces degrade the session.
• Reliable internet. A wired connection is preferred when available; connectivity options are confirmed during booking.
• A laptop per student pair is helpful but not required; the Initiative can supply the working machines.

Fees and access

The same tiered arrangement as our talks. Title I schools, under-resourced libraries, and community organizations serving underserved youth are encouraged to inquire regardless of budget; sponsored sessions are part of the program's mission. Standard institutional rates apply for organizations with program budgets. Travel within metro Atlanta is included.