Mississauga’s Andrew Shao has launched his business, ShaoBotics, with the support of the Mississauga Summer Company Program, which provides youth entrepreneurs with free training, mentorship, and a grant to help them start up a business. 

He noticed that Mississauga youth didn’t have the opportunities to learn to code and how current camps don’t provide enough support for young students ,and wanted to create a simple solution for all students to learn how to code and build robots.

“Knowing how to code, even in basic HTML, is becoming as important of a skill as learning how to speak English. Just like how we teach kids how to read and write at a very early age, they need to learn how to code shortly after, as it’s becoming more and more necessary for the workforce. Thus, I sought out to reinvent how we make STEM camps, focusing on providing high-quality and personalized lessons/tutoring for young kids at an affordable price” says Shao,

ShaoBotics provides personalized coding and robotics classes for kids aged 8 to 14, teaching them C Language and Arduino Programming. The camp comes in two levels, beginner and advanced, allowing students from any skill level to learn, build, and innovate, for only 30 dollars a week. Each level runs for 4 weeks, providing students with the opportunity to walk away with a shiny course certificate and a large robotics project to be proud of. Each week of classes comes with 2 hours of group lessons, where students learn the fundamentals of programming and robotics, and 1 hour of personalized mentorship, where each student will build a personalized project of their choosing.

Shao says “Learning to code doesn’t have to be hard. Most people believe that only the smart and top students will understand computer science or will be able to build robots, but with the appropriate mindset and effort, any student from any age can become a computer scientist or mechatronics engineer. At ShaoBotics, we strive to make this process easier for young students to break this stigma and chase their dreams.”

ShaoBotics is running online this summer as a virtual summer camp. They are offering a free robotics kit promotion which provides students with a free starter robotics kit valued at $40 if they sign up for 4 weeks. Kits are being delivered all across Mississauga and everything can be done through their website, making it even easier for young students to learn how to code and build robots.

For more information about ShaoBotics, visit sites.google.com/view/shaobotics