Every field we build this program around — robotics, coding, theme park engineering, video games, science — has Black innovators at the center of its history, not the margins. This page profiles a working set of them: verified, sourced, and worth reading past this page. If a kid asks "has anyone who looks like me done this before," the answer is yes, and here's the paper trail.
An electrical engineer and inventor who spent more than two decades at Walt Disney Imagineering, Smoot holds over 100 patents — the most of anyone in Disney's history. His inventions include the floating-head effect for the Haunted Mansion's Madame Leota and interactive technology used in attractions across Disney parks worldwide.
In 2024, he became the first Disney Imagineer ever inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame — an honor Walt Disney himself received posthumously in 2000.
Source: Black Enterprise
An architect by training, Bouza led Walt Disney Imagineering — the division responsible for every ride, attraction, and resort Disney builds worldwide — from 2020 to 2024. She was the first woman and the first person of color to lead Imagineering in its history, overseeing projects including Avengers Campus and the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser.
Source: Blooloop
An electronic engineer and one of the first Black computer engineers in Silicon Valley, Lawson led the team that built the Fairchild Channel F — the first home video game console to use swappable ROM cartridges, in 1976. Before Lawson's work, games were hard-wired into a console and couldn't be changed. His design is the reason game cartridges — and later, discs — became possible at all.
He later founded Videosoft, described by the National Museum of Play as likely the earliest Black-owned video game development company.
Source: Wikipedia
Bellamy designed for the Madden NFL franchise at Electronic Arts, where he was named the company's Rookie of the Year, before going on to lead two of the game industry's major trade organizations — the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the International Game Developers Association. He holds a BA in Engineering from Harvard College.
Source: Wikipedia
Johnson's trajectory calculations were critical to the success of America's early crewed spaceflights, including John Glenn's 1962 orbital mission and the Apollo 11 moon landing. In 2015, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Wrote a book: My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir, published posthumously in 2021 with her daughters Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore.
Source: Science News
A chemical engineer and physician, Jemison became the first Black woman to travel to space when she flew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in September 1992. Before NASA, she served as a Peace Corps medical officer in West Africa.
Wrote a book: Find Where the Wind Goes: Moments From My Life, an autobiography first published in 2001 with a young-reader edition in 2020.
Source: Blavity
Howard built robots for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before becoming Dean of Engineering at Ohio State University — the first woman to lead that college — and founding Zyrobotics, which builds therapy and learning tools for children with disabilities. She began serving as President of Spelman College in 2026.
Wrote a book: Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI (2020).
Source: Wikipedia
An Eritrean-Ethiopian computer scientist, Gebru co-founded Black in AI, a community for Black researchers in artificial intelligence, and co-led Google's Ethical AI team before departing the company in December 2020 following a public dispute over a research paper on the risks of large language models. In 2021 she founded DAIR to research AI's impact independent of corporate influence.
Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023.
Source: Wikipedia
Croak holds over 200 patents from her three decades at Bell Labs and AT&T, roughly half of them for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) — the technology behind Zoom, FaceTime, and internet phone calls. She also invented the text-to-donate system used to raise disaster relief funds after Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
In 2022, she became one of the first two Black women inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Source: Wikipedia
Dean co-invented the ISA bus — the connector standard that let a personal computer take plug-in devices like printers, disk drives, and monitors — and holds three of IBM's original nine PC patents. He led the team that built the first 1-gigahertz computer chip in 1999. In 1995, he became the first Black person named an IBM Fellow, the company's highest technical honor.
Source: IBM
An electrical engineer who spent two decades in biotech at companies including Genentech and Merck, Bryant founded Black Girls Code in 2011 after struggling to find a coding program for her own daughter with other girls who looked like her in it. The nonprofit has since taught computer programming, robotics, and app-building to thousands of girls of color across the U.S. and in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Source: Wikipedia
Born in Kumasi, Ghana, Mensah was one of the engineers who made fiber optic cable practical and affordable to manufacture — the technology that carries most of today's internet traffic. His work at Corning Glass Works in the 1980s dramatically increased manufacturing speed and cut costs.
Authored several books on innovation and nanotechnology commercialization.
Source: Wikipedia
At 26, Mankou designed the Way-C, the first tablet computer engineered in Africa, after noticing how few people in Congo could afford internet access. Priced at roughly a fifth of an iPad, it sold out its first production run within a week. He followed it with Elikia, Congo's first domestically designed smartphone, and opened a manufacturing plant near Brazzaville in 2015.
Source: Face2Face Africa
Every profile above is drawn from verifiable public sources — Wikipedia, official biographies, and established news outlets — with a source link attached so you or your kids can read further and check the facts yourselves. Nothing here is assumed or embellished; where a claim about someone was disputed or unconfirmed in the sources we checked, that person was left off rather than included with a shaky fact attached.
This is a working list, not a finished one. If there's a name you want added — especially working roboticists, coders, and engineers your kids can look up right now — tell us and we'll research and add them the same way.
