Darcy’s robot double keeps her connected
Wednesday, April 9th, 2025
Above: (left) Darcy and her brother with ‘DarcyBot’; (right) Darcy having chemotherapy treatment in hospital, interacting with her lessons remotely via ‘DarcyBot’ who was placed on her desk in her classroom. The staff of the hospital school also facilitated their sessions around her school timetable and reinforced her learning.
Darcy was four when she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and hadn’t attended school for months when her Mum contacted us. Darcy is a twin, and it was clear from her brother’s progress at school that she was falling behind in her learning and missing out on developing friendships.
We were able to lend her one of our friendly little AV1 BubbleBuster Project robots which she called ‘DarcyBot’. The robot sat in Darcy’s place at school, becoming her eyes, ears and voice in the classroom. By controlling it remotely through a tablet computer, she was able to talk, learn and interact alongside her friends – and her brother in the same class – while having the chemotherapy she needed in hospital.
With Darcy missing nearly all her reception year and going into Year 1, DarcyBot became invaluable, helping Darcy to catch up with many hours of lost learning. Skip forward a year, and she’s now having maintenance chemotherapy and attending school mostly full time. She’s working at the expected level in Maths and has nearly caught up with her reading and writing.
Darcy’s Mum believes having ‘DarcyBot’ really did help with ensuring she didn’t fall too far behind. “Socially this was something that couldn’t have been arranged by any other means. The SpecialEffect BubbleBusters team were amazing in helping set up DarcyBot and keeping in touch.” she said.
Since the BubbleBusters Project started in 2020 we’ve connected over 100 families with schools across the UK, and we look forward to our little loan robots, made by No Isolation, being reused again and again to tackle isolation and help many more pupils in the future.
Find out more about our BubbleBusters project here, and become a regular giver to help us support more children with technology here.