Filament Pilot Program Launch

We are excited to announce that our Filament Pilot Program officially begins today! In light of this exciting news, I wanted to share more information about the Filament kit and the pilot program itself. If you haven't seen our first Filament Blog Post, feel free to check that out for a more in-depth look at the kit and all the things included in it.

Our Mission

At Edjro Labs, our mission is to empower educators by creating innovative and engaging technology that inspires students to explore and excel in a future driven by data, remote sensing, and connected devices.

Filament Vision

Filament, Edjro Labs' first product line, aims to be the leading platform for engaging and inspiring K12 students to learn fundamental concepts in IoT, data science, and remote sensing technology - while mapping to state and federal standards for STEM education.

Why The Filament?

The Filament Kit is designed to address a couple of major challenges for both teachers and students in the space of computer science education. In many states, including Indiana, CS education is mandated (Senate Bill 172 in Indiana) and states have developed standards for teachers to follow. However, there is very limited curriculum and even fewer existing resources provided to help teachers meet those standards. A vast majority of the existing kits focus solely on coding and that covers only one of the many sections of the standards. Moreover, many of those existing kits are prohibitively expensive for 1:1 scenarios, with many robot kits costing upwards of $500 per kit. A combination of these factors has left CS education on the fringes of the full educational experience instead of as a core principle.

Moreover, if we take a look at some of our data from the last ten years, despite enormous spending, we have not really moved the needle in terms of computer science achievement for our students, especially at the K12 levels. There has been no increase in minorities pursuing CS degrees and an actual decrease in women pursuing them. While there may be many factors contributing to this, here at Edjro Labs we believe the biggest contributor is a widely negative perception of CS careers. Headlines are full of negative coverage of major tech companies about long hours, mistreating workers, sexism in the workplace, layoffs, and decreasing pay. All the while, the technology companies we hear the most about exist entirely in the software world and students are not connecting how that software can impact our lives.

The good news is these headlines and perceptions don't actually reflect reality. The top 10 largest tech companies on the S&P 500 account for about 30% of the total index in terms of market capitalization and about 99% of the headlines. 30% of the S&P is substantial - but it also means that 70% of the S&P isn’t “Big Tech”. Not to mention the ~$25T in estimated market cap from privately held businesses. The amount of smaller, less known companies out there who are building something that solves a real problem is staggering. Thousands of companies exist that develop critical technology that gets used in medical devices, water treatment and sanitation systems, commercial refrigeration systems, manufacturing and robotics systems, defense systems, transportation and logistics systems, agriculture, etc. “Little t tech” is absolutely everywhere - solving immensely valuable problems that humans depend on solving in real terms. What's more, these companies need to employ a lot of smart, curious people in order to solve these problems. 

The Filament Kit is designed to change those perceptions and connect the technology with human problems. Wouldn't it be inspiring to know your work on a little sensor and its firmware keeps grandpa's pacemaker working properly? The hands on IoT kit shows students how sensors, data and software together can solve real-world human problems. It enables students to literally build the connection between technology and humans.

The Filament Kit

So what is this Filament Kit and what is included in the pilot kits? At its core, the Filament Kit is an IoT (Internet of Things) Kit that is tailored for younger students. It makes all the concepts of IoT, including sensing, telemetry, data science and analysis all available to students as young as Kindergarten. Filament makes these technologies accessible by removing the need to write code - and providing a kid-friendly hardware platform. The product is backed by our IoTeach Cloud where there is a library of interactive lessons and projects, mapped to state STEM standards, that include instructions, live data feeds from sensors, and knowledge checks to confirm understanding of key concepts. 

The Pilot Program

Our Filament Kit Pilot Program is designed to get 50-100 kits into the hands of early adopters, beta testers, and innovators in educational environments. We are distributing kits free of charge in to four primary educational settings

• K12 public and charter schools

• Homeschools

• Learning Center / Science Center / Museum

• Clubs / hands on parents (as a STEM "Toy")

While the kits themselves and the cloud instances will be free, we do ask that participants provide us feedback, both formally and informally, so we can improve the overall product. We will use a pre and post survey to gather information on how the kits might be inspiring students or changing their perceptions about Computer Science careers and we will gather feedback throughout the pilot. The ultimate goal is to determine if Filament can truly inspire our students to pursue computer science!

If you are interested in participating please reach out to us directly at jason.ortiz@edjro.com or use our sign up link.