From a small school founded in 2021 in San José del Guaviare, Angie Tatiana Muñoz transformed robotics into a tool to awaken vocations, provide opportunities and change the lives of hundreds of minors in one of the departments hardest hit by the armed conflict.
Four children hid behind a tree, pointing sticks at one another as if they were weapons. Others ran behind a wall, shouting, “I killed you! I killed you!” They appeared to be seven or eight years old. Tatiana Muñoz watched the scene from the window of her rented apartment during her first weeks in San José del Guaviare in 2020.
One day, she approached the kids with the only thing she had at hand: a robotics kit that she has taken with her everywhere since she was a teenager. She asked them to bring plastic bottles and cardboard. Using servomotors and a proximity sensor, she turned the bottles into figures with hands and feet that moved when someone brought their palm close to them. Fascinated, the children from Villa Andrea neighborhood asked her how she had made that possible, so she told them to come back the following Saturday. What began with 4 children grew into a programme serving 75 students.
That is how Science Bot was born and became the first robotics school in San José del Guaviare. Five years later, this project has seven teachers on board, 3D printers, one branch and students attending classes from Spain and Australia. Tatiana drew the school’s logo when she was 12 years old in a notebook from Colegio Salesiano in Usme, southeastern Bogotá, long before she knew where Guaviare was located. Even long before someone, right there in Usme, changed the course of her life.
Mobile Classroom
For two years, Science Bot did not have a permanent location. Classes were taught in a red Renault 4 loaded with used computers. “We called the Renault ‘the red threat,’ but it actually was a mobile classroom,” she says. They would arrive in a neighborhood, unload tables and chairs, teach the class and load everything back up. On Saturdays, they would borrow Casa de la Mujer (Women’s Center); when it was occupied, they would teach outside, on the street. Later, they managed to find a place where they had to assemble and disassemble the classroom daily because they shared it with a dance project. That is how she reached indigenous communities, reintegration areas and remote rural areas, which she even reached by United Nations helicopters.
In Bogotá, she bought four second-hand computers and three robotics kits with two million Colombian pesos that she borrowed from her relatives. In February 2022, she contacted Colegio San José Obrero and created a research group. At the end of 2022, she finally opened a formal branch.
Nowadays, the school works along with several schools in San José, including Adventista Maranatha. Kindergarten teacher, Mónica Martínez, proudly says that, since Angie Tatiana came into picture, no child wants to miss class because they are excited about robotics. “Classes are taught in every grade,” she explains, amazed because she never imagined such a thing would happen in Guaviare.
Her classes reach places without internet connection, such as the Barrancón indigenous reservation, to teach astronomy to children in the Jiw community. They also reach the Territorial Area for Training and Reintegration (TATR) in Colinas, two hours away by track. In this place, she proposed, together with the children of the signatories to the Peace Agreement, to create smart greenhouses and donated robotics kits to them with support from the United Nations Mission. In five years, the school has trained more than 6,000 children both virtually and on-site. None of these numbers show what is going on inside.
The students
The first student was Juan Esteban Gómez, who arrived in 2019, at the age of nine, long before the school was formally founded and without any knowledge about robotics. Today, he is competing internationally with his project about a mini robot boat that sails the wetlands of San José and measures the physicochemical parameters of the water from which indigenous communities drink. Then, the robot boat transmits the data to an application and allows to identify changes in water quality and possible sources of contamination. “The project arrived at the Ministry of Science and Technology and Juan Esteban presented it at the Bogotá Book Fair this year, supported by the Colombia Robótica programme,” Tatiana says proudly. He will also take his project to Peru this year.
At 16, Juan Esteban is studying programming at SENA (National Service of Apprenticeship), teaches at the robotics school, is a youth counselor and leads the Plastic Maker project, which converts recycled plastic into filament to print from toys to prostheses, with which he earns his own money. Using this technique, he 3D printed the shell of the boat named Wept Life.
“Guaviare has been very stigmatized by violence. However, thanks to the school’s work, we have been recognized as national and international robotics champions. Today, I am certain that I want to devote my life to robotics,” Juan Esteban says while explaining that his robot boat was created through teamwork between children and teenagers from Guaviare.
NASA
Zully Romero started attending robotics school when she was 10 years old. Every Saturday, her parents would take her to school from the rural district of La Libertad, in the municipality of El Retorno, which is an hour and a half away by a road that was not paved at the time. Her parents are motorcycle mechanics and, when they could not bring her to school, she would go alone, at dawn. Tatiana waived her from the monthly payment of 80,000 Colombian pesos.
“She was a very shy girl. You would greet her and she would hide,” Tatiana recalls, until Zully started presenting science projects. One of her projects involved a prosthesis for a dog in her community that had lost a leg. This project took her to a competition in Mexico. She was then selected, among thousands of applicants from all over Latin America, for the Ella es Astronauta programme of the She Is Foundation, which takes girls to be trained at the NASA Johnson Space Center. She got the first place. Today, she is 16 years old, studies mechatronics and holds a scholarship at Universidad Militarin Bogotá.
“Not only did teacher Angie Tatiana change my life but also that of many children in Guaviare. She and robotics taught me more than technology: They taught me to believe in myself,” Zully says, proud to have found her purpose.
Before Zully, Valeria Vega had reached Houston: she was the first girl from Guaviare to achieve this. After her, it was Anaís’ turn, a girl from the rural district of La Paz, one of the areas in the municipality of El Retorno with the most complex public order issues.
“In the offices in Bogotá, people can talk about peace and conflict, but they have not experienced it here,” Angie Tatiana says. “I lived in Bogotá and also said: The armed conflict... but I arrived in areas of Guaviare where I saw young people with weapons in the streets as if it was normal.
That is actually living in conflict. Just imagine the environment surrounding those kids.” That is why she has become, unexpectedly, a peacemaker within her community.
Her work reached the Congress of the Republic, where a draft bill is moving forward to make robotics a mandatory subject in all schools in the country. She drafted it with House Representative Jorge Alexánder Quevedo Herrera, the only lawmaker willing to listen to her, she says.
Usme
However, at the age of 12, Tatiana Muñoz was about to take a different path: “I am ashamed to admit this because I am a teacher, but at that time, I was losing myself to the vices of the street.” Then, teacher Yeny Barrantes arrived at Colegio Don Bosco in Usme and prompted Tatiana to attend her robotics classes. “You are good for this, try it,” she said, until Tatiana agreed. Now, when they meet in national competitions, Tatiana tells her without hesitation: “you saved me; I am here because of you.” “Robotics saved my life,” she comments from Science Bot’s headquarters in Bello Horizonte neighborhood. Since then, Tatiana tries to change other kids’ lives as Yeny changed hers.
At 18, she traveled to Argentina to study robotics at Universidad Nacional de La Rioja and then completed a bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences at Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda. When she arrived in Guaviare, she was on vacation. She had packed five outfits, a computer, a drone and the robotics kit, but she got COVID and ran out of money to return to Bogotá. She made ends meet for a few months giving virtual classes to four Argentine students who paid her just enough to cover the 200,000 Colombian pesos she paid in rent. It was in that rented apartment, where she saw the children playing war games, that her story started to change.
Safety
Once, in a rural district, Tatiana asked the question she always asks at the beginning of her classes. She does not ask, “what do you want to be?” — “because we already are” — but “what would you like to study?” A boy replied that he did not think about studying, because he knew he would not be able to do so, and that he wanted to be in the military. Another kid, from the back of the classroom, answered: “well, I’m going to be a guerrilla and I’m going to kill you.” These are the types of scenes that keep her standing. “I want them to have other opportunities,” she says.
“What Angie Tatiana does shows that building peace also means expanding opportunities for children and teenagers in the territories most affected by the conflict. From the Mission, we have accompanied this effort by facilitating her arrival in the TATR and rural communities that are difficult to reach. Her initiative helps more children discover that their future can be built from knowledge, creativity, innovation and legality,” Rui Flores says, Head of the Guaviare Regional Office of the United Nations Mission.
Angie Tatiana knows her job has been worth it. Although in national competitions the children of Science Bot compete with elite schools, which arrive with cutting-edge metal robots while Tatiana’s students arrive with robots made of cardboard and recycled materials, they have won several times. Trips are a sacrifice for the school and for the parents of the children. The money to pay for those trips comes from raffles, 200,000 and 500,0000 Colombian pesos contributions from local entrepreneurs and the Governor’s Office, which has supported them on some occasions.
She does not always manage to raise enough money. She recently received an invitation to take a group of students to NASA. The trip is funded, but the visa is not. There were 40 children who had a spot and today there are 20 left: The others withdrew because they did not have the one million Colombian pesos needed for the visa procedure. She keeps knocking on doors. Most of the school’s children are low-income, she says, remembering Juan Melo Piñeros, another 12-year-old student who rides his bicycle for two hours every Saturday from the rural district of El Tigre to reach the robotics school.
Tool of peace
For Tatiana, robotics is not a distant promise of the future. It is a tool to solve the problems of the present: A boat measuring the contamination of a wetland from which the indigenous people drink, a smart greenhouse for the children of signatories to the Peace Agreement, a weather station that explains why the cave paintings of Guaviare are being erased—which are 12,000 years old—among global warming and microorganisms. “It is environmental, sustainable and educational robotics,” she says.
Last March, Angie Tatiana was invited to the United Nations Headquarters in New York, where she described her work as a methodology for building peace. But perhaps the clearest expression of that vision can be found in Guaviare every Saturday. While the department continues to make headlines for violence, a 12-year-old boy cycles two hours from his rural community to attend robotics classes. His determination speaks to the true impact of Science Bot: beyond the awards, international recognition and trips to NASA, it is giving children in Guaviare the opportunity to imagine a different future.
By: Jorge Quintero
Public Information Officer
UN Verification Mission in Colombia
