14 students complete our first Gear Lab robotics session in Haiti

We held our first GEAR Lab session in Haiti in July, for 14 students. Seven teams completed the curriculum and built Segway robots to compete. We'd hoped for more students to apply, but the Minister of Education pushed back the school calendar this year, so many of the students we'd expected were still sitting national exams when the session ran.

This past month we focused on creating marketing material to build interest in the coming sessions, and worked with our mentors on their feedback from July. We spent $2,135.50 in total (about £1,590): $785.54 on robot kits, $530.62 on mentor stipends, $288.99 on mentor onboarding, $250.53 on marketing, $208 on student food, $54 on miscellaneous costs and $18 on transfer fees.

We're pushing the sessions we postponed from July into August and September, running them back-to-back so we don't lose more time. We already have interest from new applications, so we still expect to reach our goal of impacting 120 to 140 people by the end of the summer, 14 so far. Our next session starts on 16 August, and we'll run through to 21 September without a break.