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Andrew LaPrade

Upgrade Your Game Event

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Special Olympics International and Microsoft invited Unified Robotics™ to participate in a demo about the program. Several members of the CyberKnights, who participated as peer mentors at Unified Robotics™ in its pilot season, attended this event in order to share and expand the program to more schools and individuals with Intellectual Disabilities. Read More

What is Unified Robotics™?

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Unified Robotics™ is a student-designed and implemented robotics program open to students with, and without, intellectual disabilities (ID), as well as students with a variety of learning and behavior challenges. Unified Robotics includes an equal number of participants as robotics team “peer mentors” to train, strategize and compete.

Unified Robotics the first of its kind and brings the world of STEM and the sport of robotics to more high school students interested in STEM – including many students who are often excluded from extracurricular activities. Peer mentors from a FIRST® Robotics team work one-on-one with students with ID to build robots using EV3 kits made by LEGO®. Small teams of four students create their own robot including designing, building, and programming the robot. At the final tournament-style competition, each team presents their robot and its features, and competes in a new game created each year.

Unified Robotics was piloted last fall with four Seattle high schools, and had fantastic results, generating significant media attention, locally and nationally. Delaney Foster, CEO of the CyberKnights, a FIRST Robotics Competition Team (4911), is the founder and designer of the program. She was inspired by Special Olympics® Unified Sports® programs to create a robotics program that her sister, Kendall, who has autism and ID, could participate in. The CyberKnights ran the first season of Unified Robotics at Kendall’s school, Roosevelt High School, in Seattle. Students with special needs from two other Seattle public high schools joined together on this team. In the fall of 2016, Unified Robotics expanded to several other Seattle area high schools so that the final competition would be an inter-school tournament.

The CyberKnights, Special Olympics, and FIRST are currently working together to form a strategic partnership to expand the Unified Robotics program to the national level. In addition, Special Olympics is talking with the WIAA (Washington Interscholastic Activities Association) to recognize Unified Robotics as a sanctioned high school program, and develop a state tournament format. Plans are in motion to introduce Unified Robotics to the world at the 2018 USA Games, televised by ESPN. The CyberKnights have created a Unified Robotics Guidebook and are working with other FIRST Robotics teams to form a Unified Robotics Alliance, a coalition which is committed to fostering acceptance, equity and inclusion in their schools. In April, Delaney and her team presented Unified Robotics at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in St. Louis.

Unified Robotics helps bring together students of diverse populations and abilities as teammates and competitors on the field of play – providing leadership opportunities and paving the way for social inclusion community wide. There has been a dramatic transformation in all the students involved in this program, the participants and the peer mentors. “Creating the norm,” is a term Delaney uses to explain her vision for the near future when she and her teammates will be in leadership positions in STEM industries, and will be actively promoting neuro-diverse hiring policies, and workplace accommodation and adaptation. Through experiences like Unified Robotics, students are breaking down stereotypes around individuals with ID and other learning & behavioral challenges, as well as stereotypes which exist in STEM.