The Ark.
Jeff Dempsey.
April 25, 2018.
As dozens of volunteers and students prepared for a recent Reaching Out With Robotics competition at Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in Marin City, Kavi Dolasia was easy to spot. She was the one jumping from group to group, double-checking the sign-in sheet, going over the itinerary with volunteer judges and helping competitors make last-minute adjustments to their robots.
At just 15 years old, the Strawberry resident is the co- founder of Reaching Out With Robotics, an organization she started with her older sister, Sona, in 2014. Both girls were on the robotics team at Mill Valley Middle School when they realized there was a lack of exposure to robot- ics among segments of their peers.
“My sister and I looked into it after we noticed from her science and math classes that a lot of students at (Bayside academy) were not getting that kind of experience, so we wanted to see what we could do,” Kavi says. “I fell in love with robotics, and I wanted to explore it more by teaching it to other kids.”
Bayside MLK had Lego robotics kits available, so Kavi and Sona started a program at the K-8 school, with eight students meeting once a week. Four years later, Reaching Out with Robotics now has programs for middle-schoolers at Bayside, Mill Valley Middle School, Willow Creek Academy in Sausalito and the Technology Resource Center of Marin County, a county office of education program that serves special-education students. There are also programs at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library and the Mill Valley Public Library.
The programs at each location are run by a group of 12 volunteer students from Tamalpais High School, where Kavi is a sophomore. Both Meera and Rupen Dolasia, Kavi’s parents, say they are amazed at how much Reaching Out has grown in four years.
Meera noted how dedicated Kavi remains to expanding. She says Kavi makes frequent pitches to other schools and libraries.
“It’s crazy, Kavi keeps writing to all these people. Half the time I don’t know who she’s writing to,” Meera says. “I keep telling her she has too much on her plate, and she keeps saying, ‘No, I’ll manage.’”
Rupen Dolasia says his nickname for Kavi is Reaching Out’s “growth CEO.”
“There is Sona, the founding CEO, and now Kavi is the person who is taking it on a growth path. She’ll tell me she has another interview because she’s expanding, and I think, ‘Where is the time?’”
Kavi says the Reaching Out programs typically start in October with the fundamentals of robotics, with kids learning how to build and program the semi-autonomous machines. Then, in January, the groups start to work to- ward the organization’s spring competition. “They pick which category they want to compete in and we work on their robots,” Kavi says. This year’s third annual competition, held April 18, had five different events, including one that tasked the stu- dents with programming a robot to follow a path laid out on the ground and another that required the robot to push over a series of cardboard tubes.
Shaniya Valentine, 9, was competing with her group from Bayside academy. She says she joined the robotics program in September because she wants to pursue a career in the science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, field.
“When I get older, I want to build things,” she says.
She says the class has already taught her some valuable lessons.
“I’m learning how to program robots, and I learned to try and try again no matter what,” she says.
As her team prepared for the competition, she says she was excited but also a little nervous. “Our robot is working, but it’s scaring me,” she says. “We are competing in the tube push, and when our robot comes to a stop, the tube doesn’t always fall.”
Mill Valley Middle School teacher Ben Wien taught ro- botics to Sona and Kavi when they were students at the school, and on April 18 brought the school’s current robotics team to the competition his former students created. “I’m inspired by what Sona and Kavi have done with this,” he says. “Just how they’ve been able to get other kids hands-on and invested in learning and building things.” While he may be inspired by the program, he isn’t the least bit surprised at what Kavi has accomplished, he says.
“As a middle-schooler she started doing the robotics projects with me and just never stopped. She would have a project and come in on her extra time to work on it,” he says. “Then as soon as she was in high school, I felt like I was talking to a colleague.”
Tiburon resident Samantha Walravens, who wrote a book about women in technology called “Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech,” served as a judge in the April 18 competition. She brought her daughter, Gigi, a fourth-grader at Bel Aire Elementary School who takes part in Reaching Out’s Belvedere-Tiburon Library program on Sundays.
“I want to be an engineer,” Gigi says. “I want to make a robot that is so high-tech that when you forgot something it will bring it to you in a second.”
Walravens says she was happy to support Reaching Out.
“I see Kavi and Sona as role models for young girls who aspire not just to pursue a career in technology but also just to play around in it,” she says. “It’s so important for girls to be around other girls when they are coding or doing robotics. We need to get more women in that tech pipeline so when my daughters grow up they won’t be alone.”
Now that the competition is wrapped up, Kavi says she will get back to hitting the phones and writing letters, looking for new places to reach out with robotics.
“It’s really cool because when we started here at (Bay- side academy), we had eight kids enrolled and now we have 20,” she says. “I really want to get all around Marin and into more of the Bay Area. I really do want to keep expanding.”
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