Rolling Robots Keeps Focus On Students Throughout Pandemic

Los Angeles, CA — Aerospace engineers Bing Jiang and Dr. George Kirkman abandoned the high-paced environment of satellite construction in the early 2000s, chasing instead a passion for teaching kids to establish the family-owned business Rolling Robots.

“I have this passion forever to want to work with young kids,” Jiang said, “because young kids have a big open mind and they still haven’t set their opinion about the world, so you have an opportunity to influence them and show them what’s possible. We really wanted to do something that is directly impacting the kids.”

It was that passion for instructing kids that led the couple to open up Rolling Robots in 2008, a company that has gone through several adaptations since its opening.

Initially inspired by Build-A-Bear Workshop, Rolling Robots began as a retail spot for kids that were interested in robots to come in, build a robot and take that robot to one of the first-ever robot battle arenas which had been constructed in the shop itself. That initial model quickly morphed into a more focused niche, however, when Rolling Robots started offering birthday parties — focused around robotic construction.

Though Rolling Robots has maintained its offering of birthday parties until the pandemic, its main focus quickly morphed into one centered more around education.

“We added more on the education side of things,” Jiang said. “And with the STEM boom, more and more people understand what we’re trying to do. So that’s why we’re able to build up this competition team, which is really nice.”

With this new bent on teaching robotics in a hands-on, interactive environment, Rolling Robots expanded into several locations through the L.A. area, fostering competitive teams of students for all grade levels.

Since 2014, the robotics competition teams made up of Rolling Robots students have competed in and won world robotics championship competitions; the company also has students that have gone on to attend such universities as MIT, Carnegie Melon and UC Berkely.

“I just felt that along the way, we’ve really helped these kids,” Jiang said. “That with little robotic competitions and through their years of hard work, by high school time these kids all become leaders. The trajectory of how much these kids grow from just fifth grade to high school is just amazing. So many things come in play; the leadership, the presentation, the communication all come into play. That’s why I love this so much — it brings everything together through just the little interest of robots.”

When the lockdown first began in March 2020, Rolling Robots closed each of its workshops for a period of two weeks while they worked to adapt to the new environment.

“We immediately have to pivot, because everything is on-site, we had to shut it down,” Jiang said. “Basically, when we shut down, we took about two weeks and immediately converted everything into an online workshop which required us to set up a hardware-sharing delivery system.”

Faced with a situation that demanded no human contact for absolute safety, and an educational outlet that required some level of contact, Rolling Robots amped up its online workshops and offerings and quickly established a hybrid teaching and learning environment.

“What we did with our teams that didn’t go away, we increased our online sessions,” which covered a variety of topics such as robot design and CAD (computer-aided design tool), Jiang said. “Then we spread all the teams out so that at any given time, there’s only one team there.”

For those teams that needed some in-person element in order to continue their projects, the kids remained in what were essentially learning pods consisting solely of their teammates.

“We were able to adapt in that fashion,” Jiang said. “The whole year we were doing this hybrid thing. So we were never really fully online, we always have been hybrid, especially for our competition team members. The one thing good about that is we kept our competition teams alive. We were able to keep these kids going, so that’s one thing I’m really proud of. They didn’t lose that continuity of being involved in robotics.”

Several of Rolling Robots’ competitive elementary and high school teams either placed in or won the recently-held state championship, and will soon be moving on to the world championship.

“Through such a tough year, their life is very bright at this time,” Jiang said. “We’re not talking about a loss of anything, we’re just talking about how much more we can do in the last months to do better, so it’s really, really good for them. By doing the hybrid we were able to keep this thing going.”

Beyond keeping its competition teams alive through this period of quarantine and lockdown, Rolling Robots took to its website, revamping the layout and offerings to be more competitive in an online environment.

“We were able to build a whole new site and we were able to build it so that our workshops are actually presented with information,” Jiang said. “The book is there for you — if you really want to learn on your own, it’s there to guide you already. The whole point of that is to really build our service as a student-centered service. We put our students in the forefront, giving them the opportunity to learn on their own, and we’re really here to guide them when they need it.”

It is that model that Jiang feels sets Rolling Robots apart from a more traditional STEM education. The instructors at Rolling Robots are there to help each student achieve his or her individual goals, allowing each student to foster an internal love of STEM and robotics which enforces their drive to learn more.

And though the remote environment has made the hands-on model of robotics instruction more difficult, it has also opened up several doors for Rolling Robots, allowing them to take on remote students across the nation and allowing their students access to experts in the field.

“We were able to replace [the birthday parties] with online learning, online workshops, and we kept our competition teams going,” Jiang said. “This year is a record-high number of teams going to world championship, which is really exciting for us. We were also doing a new AI robotics competition, and they get to go to their own world championship. We had some amazing scientists from IBM teaching them, working with them. That’s really the benefit of the whole virtual world.”

Through these adaptations and innovations, the focus for Rolling Robots is really on the kids.

“Helping them to discover their passion, giving them the room to grow into the kind of tech genius they already are, finding this path of their own and supporting them along the way,” Jiang said. “Robotics is just the tool; it’s really about the community.”

Through work done with Rolling Robots Outreach, the nonprofit offshoot of the business, Rolling Robots is able to promote STEM more equally to kids, making STEM education more available and accessible to kids from a variety of backgrounds, reinforcing Jiang’s passion for education.

“Little by little you’re getting more people realized in the field,” Jiang said. “They feel good and they will find their passion, and hopefully that’s all the better for the future.”