Where in the World is Roversa: What We’re Building With Teachers

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside educators in classrooms, workshops, and at the NAPE Summit.

In education, conversations are often framed in terms of what teachers need to learn. But what’s becoming clear is what they are already holding, not just lesson plans or standards, but responsibility, tension, and risk. Teachers are not avoiding challenges; they are constantly navigating them.
A NAPE session on Supporting Equity and Excellence in the Multigenerational Workforce highlighted one gap that keeps showing up: professional learning is too often designed for teachers instead of with them. When lived experience, generational perspectives, and insights are overlooked, it minimizes the very expertise the work is meant to build. What’s needed instead is something deeper than inclusion. It’s radical empathy and the willingness to understand what people are navigating before we ask them to take on something new.

We talk frequently about creating “safe spaces” for students, but what does that look like for teachers, especially when the work itself is complex, messy, and uncertain?

At the NAPE Summit, that question felt especially relevant. Across keynotes and sessions, there was a shared commitment to equity-centered teaching, along with an honest acknowledgment that this work is not just intellectually demanding. It is emotionally and professionally complex, requiring educators to navigate discomfort, hold multiple truths, and make decisions about when to push and when to pause.

Before our session, Build-a-Bot: Democratizing Manufacturing and Design in STEM Education, I noticed a question from a participant in the conference app: “I am curious to see if I can do this.” It wasn’t about standards or classroom application, it was simply about whether they could step into the experience themselves.

The session itself was far from perfect. My laptop had issues with the projector, some of the kits weren’t packaged quite right, and there were challenges during the build process. But no one left out of frustration or stopped when things got hard. Instead, teachers leaned in, helped each other, and stayed with the process. By the end of the session, every participant was part of a team that successfully built a robot.

That environment didn’t happen by accident. It functioned as a safe space, not one without challenge, but one where challenge was expected, supported, and shared. Teachers had room to try, to troubleshoot, and to rely on each other, and that made all the difference. Teachers don’t disengage when things are challenging; they disengage when they don’t feel supported in working through those challenges.

This doesn’t represent a shift in how I think about Roversa. If anything, it’s a confirmation that we are on the right track. From the beginning, the goal hasn’t been to create something teachers simply implement, but something they can shape, that leaves room for their expertise, their context, and their decision-making.

What we saw at NAPE and in classrooms reinforces that. When teachers are given the space to try, troubleshoot, and build alongside each other, even when things don’t go perfectly, they persist. They collaborate. They figure it out, not because everything is easy, but because the conditions make it possible to stay in the work.

That’s the kind of environment we want Roversa to support. This work, whether it’s building robots, exploring AI, or trying something new in the classroom, thrives when we create safe, collaborative spaces where teachers can explore, learn, and grow.

At NAPE, there was also a reference to author Octavia Butler; the idea that we have to be able to envision the future we want to be part of. Teachers are already doing that work. The question is whether we are building in ways that support them in it or in ways that make it harder.