Trashbots Expands and Gains Nationwide Recognition

By McKenzie Carpenter | Wednesday, 30 June 2021 | Startup, Tech

Trashbots, a childrens’ engineering startup, has grown rapidly and achieved a difficult feat for entrepreneurs in the United States (US).

What Is Trashbots?

Trashbots is an educational startup company that develops STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) kits for K-12 children to explore and harness their interests in robotics and coding. Founded by brothers Rohit and Sidharth Srinivasan, the business was created after the brothers volunteered at various orphanages around India. It was through this volunteerism that they noticed that some children had fewer opportunities as a result of their circumstances.

Shortly thereafter, the business was founded. In essence, the company seeks to provide STEM education for students and educators that is more accessible, easier, collaborative, and inclusive for students from all types of backgrounds.

In the company kits, the business provides tangible items needed to build robots. Through the Trashbots mobile app, students and educators can work together to make their robots operational through the use of block programming. Block programming is code that has been grouped together.

The founders of the company sat down for an interview with Startup Savant, where they went into greater detail about what Trashbots is, how they do what they do, and how the company got to where it is today.

New Updates

Since early June, when Startup Savant wrote a feature on the business, the company has grown rapidly. Trashbots technology has been implemented in more than 50 schools and 12 districts in the US, and thousands of students across the country have used the kits created by the startup.

One school that has utilized the STEM resources is BASIS Charter Schools — the largest charter school system in the US. Additionally, Racine Unified School District, the third-largest school district in Wisconsin, deployed 1,600 Trashbots units to every sixth-grader in the district.

In an interview with Startup Savant, co-founder Sidharth Srinivasan said, “That's when you get the confidence that, ‘Hey, look. We might've stumbled onto something big here.’ In all honesty, that's what kind of fuels our passion towards wanting to grow this bigger and wanting to implant Trashbots into more and more school districts around the country. It's because every single time we see a student play with it, the resounding feedback, the positive feedback that we get, it gives you so much satisfaction and gratification for creating a platform like this.”

Furthermore, the business was recently granted its first US patent (patent number 11,024,197) for its “robotics and computing learning platform with multi-level processing architecture.”

Educational Expenditures

Education is arguably the foundation of a person’s identity as it can help children, adolescents, and even adults target their interests and provide them with the tools to be successful in the future.

Since a child’s educational experience can be so formative, it comes as no surprise that educational spending in the US continues to rise. According to the US Census Bureau, $12,612 was spent per student in public elementary and secondary education facilities across the country — a 3.4% increase compared to $12,201 spent per student in 2017. In that same report, state governments reportedly allocated $337 billion for public schools.

While state governments spend large amounts on public education as a whole, Boris Granovskiy, an analyst in education policy for the Congressional Research Service, reported that the federal government allots between $2.8 billion to $3.4 billion for STEM education.

About the Author

McKenzie Carpenter

McKenzie Carpenter is a graduate of Central Michigan University with a B.A.A. in Integrative Public Relations and French. McKenzie has previously worked for small businesses and nonprofit organizations.