According to techcrunch.com, E-liza Dolls, a Berkeley based startup, is aiming to close the gender gap in STEm by helping young girls learn to code through dolls. The company builds dolls that include programmable computers that girls can code through an app. The startup was originally founded in 2021 by Eliza Kosoy, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, who is focused on the intersection of child development and artificial intelligence. Kosoy came up with the idea for the dolls back in 2017 while working at MIT in an AI lab that was made up of mainly men. She said that is when she came up with the idea to help young girls to learn how to code.
Kosoy aimed to find a way that girls could learn about coding without giving up their interests, which is why she decided on using dolls. The purpose of the dolls is to help girls feel confident when it comes to exploring STEM through giving them a product that is designed for them. The market is saturated with toys that are designed and marketed for and by males. That is why Kosoy aimed to design soemthing for girls.
Kosoy told TechCrunch that, “We want to expose young girls to technological concepts and encourage creative thinking through hardware and software, preventing girls from being influenced by generational stereotypes, Parents have so few options; they feel they need to force their daughters to play with STEM products designed for boys in order to get their daughters on a STEM path. We believe little girls don’t have to sacrifice their interests in order to play with educational STEM toys.”
E-liza dolls is talking with manufacturers and is planning to launch on Kickstarter in 2023. Kosoy says that the team is only one prototype away from the Kickstarter launch and plans to add a few interations to the dolls and enhance their design features. After the Kickstarter launch, the company plans to release the product officially in mid-2023.
The 18 inch dolls operate through a piece of hardware that is embedded in each doll. The device has a screen and is Bluetooth-enabled so that it can receive code via the doll’s companion app. The users of the dolls can also plug in different sensors or use the built in sensors to code the doll to do different things, such as building a security alarm for your room through using a distance sensor or creating a truth detector using a heartbeat pulse sensor.
Since the dolls have launched, E-liza Dolls has gotten $100,000 in funding from AIX Ventures, the company is currently in the middle of raising a pre-seed round that cosists of funding from sevral different angel investors including poet Rupi Kaur.
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