Débora Garofalo is a public school teacher in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2015, she started the Robotics with Scrap (Robótica com Sucata) project to teach robotics and computational thinking to children and young people in the city of São Paulo using recycled materials and trash from their neighborhoods. Since 2015, over 2000 students have been directly involved in this project and today the work became a public policy of the State of São Paulo which impacts 2.5 million students.
Débora is currently Coordinator of the São Paulo Basic Education Innovation Center (CIEBP) at the State Secretary of Education, which aims to democratize access to innovation, maker culture, programming, robotics and digital fabrication for over 3.5 million students. She studied Literature and Pedagogy, with specialization in Portuguese Language at Unicamp, and earned a Master’s in Education from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.
Due to her work in Public Education, Débora has received several important awards, including: Teachers of Brazil 2018, MIT Creative Learning Challenge 2019, UN Peacekeeper Medal 2019 and considered one of the 10 best Teachers in the World by the Global Teacher Prize 2019 considered the Nobel of Education.