Xyla Foxlin

Foxlin invented a huggable teddy bear called Parihug[13] 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.[6][14][15] The toy attracted sufficient attention so that it became a startup firm.[14] With co-founder Harshita Gupta, the stuffed animals won the SXSW Tech Fest Reader's Choice award.[16] She also won the university's Spartan Challenge Entrepreneurial Competition in its development.[17]

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.[14][8][18] The website was described as an "online village that is designed to reduce the barrier to entry into makerspaces".[3] It offers video tutorials about 3-D printing, cutting with lasers, soldering, and other engineering-related tasks.[19] Forbes contributor Amy Blankson described her as an inspiring role model who has been working to close the "STEM gender gap" by utilizing modern media.[20]

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.[14]

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, Derek Muller, 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;[21][22] 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.[23][24] She launched a tiara into space using weather balloon technology, with cameras on the balloon to record the flight and send back data to her controller. The camera, but not the tiara, was recovered hundreds of miles away.[25]

In May 2021, she built a high powered wood rocket in five days.[26] 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.[27] 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.[28] In 2021, Foxlin designed a bulletproof gown and then shot bullets at the gown to see if the kevlar materials in the gown were effective at stopping the bullets.[29] At Christmas time in 2021, along with Joe Barnard, she launched a seven foot tall Christmas tree 300 feet into the air, with a "rocket stuffed up its ... bottom".[25]