Ayanna Howard wants to save the world
This former NASA researcher is helping level the tech playing field for kids everywhere.
Ayanna Howard has been fascinated by technology since she was a little girl. The former NASA robotics researcher and current bioengineering professor at Georgia Tech says shows like “Battlestar Galactica” and “Star Trek” piqued her interest, but it wasn’t until middle school, when she discovered “The Bionic Woman” show, something inside clicked. “It was the first time I remember seeing a female in this positive light,” Howard says. “She wasn’t just behind the scenes — she was first and foremost, she was intelligent, she was beautiful, and she was saving the world.”
Today, along with teaching, Howard helps run a children’s STEM camps program she started, and is the founder of Zyrobotics, an inclusive tech company that aims to develop products children of all ability levels can use and learn from. “I’d been doing STEM camps for middle- and high-school kids,” Howard says. “In one of my camps I had a young lady who had a visual impairment — she was bright, but we just didn’t have enough technology for her. About four years ago I applied for and received a grant from the National Science Foundation to basically design technologies to engage children with disabilities in robotics programming camps.” She soon realized that, not only was there a need for these products outside of just her camps, but she needed to create an actual company to get these ideas and products, and she puts it, “out of the lab and into society.”
Zyrobotics now has a distribution deal through Amazon’s new initiative Launch Pad, which partners with tech-driven startups to help them get the word out about their offerings through stocking, purchasing, advertising and more. Plus, Howard was a recently named a winner of Glamour magazine’s annual Starters Project, which recognizes five women across the country who’ve started promising businesses in the past few years. On the horizon, Howard says Zyrobotics is about two years away from producing a robot education coach with a system that’ll be designed for children of all capabilities.
“What happens with a lot of assistive technologies is it makes a kid feel different,” Howard says. “Even if a kid has a disability, they still want to interact just like every other kid. We’re really excited because now we have products where their friends want to use it just like them. It kind of equals the playing field, so i’m really excited about that.”