BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Instead of using his winter break to rest and relax, Moravian Academy senior Shiv Patel has been leading robotics workshops for elementary school students in Ahmedabad, India.
“This is something I really [am] invested in,” Patel, 18, told LehighValleyNews.com ahead of his December trip.
Patel, who returns to his Bethlehem home this week, since 2023 has encouraged Indian children to pursue robotics and provided them with the knowledge, equipment and support they need to succeed.
Patel named his passion project RoboReach.
“Our intention is to provide holistic, supportive education.”Nimesh Patel, a Manav Sadhna trustee and longtime volunteer
Over the past two years, RoboReach has worked with the nongovernmental organization, Manav Sadhna, to train a team of middle schoolers in competitive robotics.
Manav Sadhna runs five large community centers in Ahmedabad for underprivileged students, who live in the city’s slum communities, which suffer from overcrowding and inadequate sanitation.
The centers offer instruction in math, science, English and Gujarati, the native language of the region. They also have sports and arts programming for students.
Patel’s family donates to Manav Sadhna, and he learned more about the NGO through Nimesh Patel, a family friend who works there.
“Our intention is to provide holistic, supportive education,” said Nimesh Patel, a Manav Sadhna trustee and longtime volunteer.
Nimesh Patel said the NGO focuses on academics for students in first through ninth grades to supplement their government schooling, which he said is lacking in quality.
Workshops begin
In March 2023, Shiv Patel visited a Manav Sadhna community center while on vacation in India and began talking with students there about his passion for robotics.
They had never heard of robots before, he said.
In the United States, robotics are “everywhere,” Shiv Patel said, but that’s not the case in the slums of Ahmedabad, the capital of the Indian state of Gujarat.
“They don't live in a place where [they] can see it everywhere,” he said. “They see trash everywhere. They see poverty everywhere.”
After his conversation with students, Shiv Patel said he decided to go back to India to teach them all about coding and robots.
In fall 2023, the teen raised $15,000 to buy 15 robotics kits and 15 iPads to take to India that December for his first robotics workshops at Manav Sadhna’s community centers.
He raised $3,000 more that went toward additional robotics education for a group of 18 high-achieving students.
With the support of Manav Sadhna, that small group of middle schoolers began studying robotics at the University of Ahmedabad on the weekends.
Shiv Patel kept in touch with the students through a group chat, offering mentorship and encouragement. He also spoke weekly with their teacher, providing curriculum suggestions and getting updates on their progress.
In July 2024, the group of students got “crushed” in a local robotics competition, “and we decided that more practice was needed,” Shiv Patel said.
RoboReach team makes progress
The students added practice hours to their weekends and signed up for a regional robotics competition through the World Robot Olympiad.
For the innovation category of the competition, the students designed and coded a robot to hold a pencil and use it to draw a house.
In another category, the students coded their robot to follow lines and knock other robots out of the way on an obstacle course.
“I’ve already won as a person because they’ve done so, so much."Shiv Patel, 18, Moravian Academy senior
The RoboReach team got second place out of 30 teams.
Six months later the students went to the state competition, where they placed first out of 50 teams and continued on to the international competition.
In September, the Roboreach students flew to Hyderabad, India, to compete against 100 robotics teams from across Asia, including China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan and Thailand.
For their innovation category, they built a 3D printer out of Legos and showed a time-lapse video of it printing a small silicon boat.
They also coded a robot to compete in line-following and obstacle course scenarios.
They placed fourth at the international competition, which Shiv Patel said is “absolutely crazy.”
“I’ve already won as a person because they’ve done so, so much,” he said. “They’ve done even more than I thought they could ever do.”
Working with the students and seeing their success has been “heartwarming,” Shiv Patel said.
Shiv Patel’s mother said she hopes the students’ robotics training can become more than just a hobby one day.
“I would love to see all these robotics kids [go] have professions and lift up their family and break the cycle of poverty,” Sejal Patel said.
Additional philanthropy, robotics efforts
In the meantime, Shiv Patel also created the nonprofit organization Steps of Kindness to make sure Ahmedabad students have the school supplies they need to learn.
Over the past two years, he has raised $40,000 to buy shoes, books and lunch boxes for school children throughout the city.
He relies on donations from community members in the Lehigh Valley and those from pharmaceutical companies, engineering firms and others throughout the country.
Shiv Patel also raised an additional $40,000 to build a computer lab at a girls’ school in India’s Jaisalmer Desert.
He contacted a company that was able to donate a cell tower, too, so the students can use their new technology once the project is completed.
Shiv Patel’s philanthropy isn’t exclusive to India, though. He also has worked to bring robotics learning to Lehigh Valley school children.
For the past two summers, Shiv Patel has volunteered at his high school’s summer program, offering robotics workshops to middle schoolers from Allentown, Bethlehem Area and Easton Area school districts.
“He’s extremely passionate [and] energetic,” Jarred Weaver, director of Moravian Academy’s Lehigh Valley Summerbridge program, said of Shiv Patel.
“You can tell he loves working with kids. He loves imparting his knowledge of robotics to the middle school kids.”
Shiv Patel also teaches a robotics summer workshop at Central Elementary STREAM Academy in Allentown.
He hopes to build an after-school robotics program there in coming months, he said.
