STEM education and STEM careers have a gatekeeping problem.
These spaces decide early who is “a technical person” and who isn’t. Jargon is used as a filter and complexity as a credential. The education space moves fast through the parts that need care, and spends forever on prerequisites that aren’t always necessary. These spaces were designed by and for a narrow slice of people, and then everyone else’s inability to learn from it gets called a personal failure.
I’ve watched brilliant women tell me they were “bad at math,” or young folks say they “didn’t get” coding when what they meant was: someone told me that, once, and I believed them.
I built FoxBot because that broke my heart every time I heard it. And because it doesn’t have to be this way.
The problem is not you.
Technology keeps changing. The gatekeeping stays the same.
Right now it’s happening with AI: the same jargon, the same implicit message: this is for technical people, and you’re not one. The same outcome: capable people sitting on the outside of tools that could change their work, their homes, and their communities.
But there’s a second, quieter problem alongside the gatekeeping one. Even when people do get access to technology, most of what they’re taught is how to use it on someone else’s terms, for someone else’s purposes, in systems they didn’t design and can’t change.
I’ve spent over a decade teaching science and technology to people who were told it wasn’t for them. Every single time, this “not a tech person” became someone who could do it. Always. Without exception.
The most powerful moment is never “I learned to code.” It was “I built something that solved a real problem. I fixed the thing myself. I made the tool do what I needed it to do.”
That’s what FoxBot is for.
What we believe
Technology should serve people and communities, not the other way around.
The most important skill isn’t knowing how to use today’s tools. It’s understanding things well enough to adapt them, fix them, teach them to others, and build something new when the existing options don’t work for you.
We are not waiting for tech companies to make things more accessible, more equitable, or more suited to the lives we’re actually trying to live. We’re building what we need, with what we have, right now.
That means making things with our hands. Automating garden care. Fixing an electronics cable without a soldering iron. Building a community resource board. Running a repair café. Wiring the sensor. Teaching our neighbors.
It means using AI as a tool, not a crutch or a replacement. Understanding how it works well enough to know when to trust it, when to question it, and how to make it do something useful for your actual life, not just the life a tech executive imagined for you.
It means building local, resilient systems: things your community can understand, maintain, and adapt, rather than systems that break the moment a company pivots or a subscription lapses.
What we do
FoxBot teaches the full stack of building better systems:
Physical making: circuits, electronics, repair, low-tech hacks, hands-on fabrication. Because understanding how things work at the level of electrons and materials changes what you can do in the world.
Digital making: coding, automation, AI tools used as building tools. Because the digital layer is now inseparable from the physical one, and you deserve to understand both.
Systems thinking: how to design something that works in the real world, connects to local resources, and can be maintained and improved over time.
Teaching and sharing: how to bring others along. Because the goal is never just individual skill. It is communities of people who can build together.
We teach by doing. Every concept gets grounded in something real you can make, fix, or use. We’re honest about difficulty – when something is hard, we say so, and slow down. We price fairly, with sliding scale and scholarships, because the people who most need these skills are often the ones least able to pay full price. We don’t use dark patterns – no countdown timers, no artificial scarcity, no upsell pressure.
And we build this together. What FoxBot teaches next comes from what you need. The people who learn here become part of what FoxBot becomes.
Who this is for
You don’t have to be a technical person. You have to be someone who’s done waiting for the systems to work for you.
Done waiting for the tools to get easier, for the companies to act in your interest, for the moment when you’ll finally feel ready. Done watching the future get built by a small group of people and handed to everyone else as a product.
If you want to understand how things work, if you want to fix, build, and make, with your hands and with technology, and if you want to be part of a community that’s building something better instead of just consuming what already exists..
You’re welcome here, wherever you’re starting from.
“The revolt against [Earth’s] destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can’t buy and corporations can’t command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning.” — Rebecca Solnit
That’s what this is. A small revolt in favor of producers over consumers, makers over users, builders over bystanders. In favor of the person who was told they weren’t a science person — and decided, eventually, to find out for themselves.
Don’t wait for the future. Build it.
— Jen Fox (Engineer. Maker. Educator. Builder of accessible things.)