Xyla Foxlin

Xyla Foxlin is an American engineer, entrepreneur and YouTuber.^[2]

Foxlin designs and builds projects requiring woodworking and engineering skills, and posts YouTube videos about how she went about building them. For example, in 2021, at the request of a fellow YouTuber, she built a model car that uses a gear and propeller system to apply drive from a treadmill to make it travel faster than the treadmill was running;^[3] she was able to build the vehicle after learning that the key design detail is the vehicle speed ratio, which describes the optimal way to transmit power from the wheels to spin the propeller.^[4][5] In May 2021, she built a high powered wood rocket in five days.^[6] She built a kayak out of clear fiberglass and lit it internally with a plethora of LED colored lights, so her craft, which she nicknamed Rainbowt, lights up on the water even at night.^[7] In another video, Foxlin went on a cross country road trip through the southern and western United States, collecting a piece of wood from trees grown in each of the states, which she machined into wooden puzzle pieces of a map of the country.^[8]

Foxlin grew up in Boston and attended Lexington High School.^[9] As a sophomore, she found part-time work by using a hyperlocal job search website called HelpAroundTown.^[9] She was captain of the school's robotics team in her junior and senior years.^[2] She attended Case Western University and majored in mechanical and aerospace engineering where she was described in a magazine as a "robotics whiz kid".^[10] She was president of the college's robotics mining team.^[10] She invented a huggable teddy bear called Parihug which features two matching bears; each bear is "stuffed with wireless and Bluetooth technology" so that when it is hugged, it sends a signal to its twin over the Internet so that a person with the other bear will feel it vibrate softly and get a message about the hug.^[10][11] The toy attracted sufficient attention so that it became a startup firm.^[11] With co-founder Harshita Gupta, the stuffed animals won the SXSW Tech Fest Reader's Choice award.^[12] While in Cleveland, she entered a beauty contest and won the title for Greater Miss Cleveland; her skill was playing a violin using a Tesla coil that she developed.^[10][13][14] In 2017 when she was harassed by an anonymous Twitter follower, she used her connections to find the identity of her harasser; it turned out she was a woman and fellow robotics student that Foxlin had once mentored.^[15][16]

With a classmate, she launched a 501-c(3) non-profit called Beauty and the Bolt to empower women and minorities to excel in engineering.^[11][14] The website was described as an "online village that is designed to reduce the barrier to entry into makerspaces".^[2] It offers video tutorials about 3-D printing, cutting with lasers, soldering, and other engineering-related tasks.^[17] In 2021, there was a 3D statue made of her, along with other women leaders in the field of aviation and aerospace-related fields, that was displayed at Dallas Love Field in Texas.^[18]

My big thing is that femininity and engineering are not mutually exclusive. I’m still the only one in a dress at design reviews or the only one wearing all pink in the shop. We should be teaching our girls that it’s OK to like princesses and power tools.

— Foxlin in Cleveland Magazine in 2017.^[11]

References[]

External links[]

• The stuffed animal that’ll hug your kids from afar Parihug
• Building a giant wooden rocket in 5 days YouTube video
• TED talk by Xyla Foxlin