Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyler Olds
I'm not going to read through all the comments on here but here's the process and feedback from my team's experience from last year:
One of my female students saw the post for Indy-Rage last year and after telling other girls on the team who became interested they practically begged me to go.
Girls who attended the event overwhelmingly had a blast being able to drive/operate/participate in a lead role and mentored first year female students attending to get them comfortable in the environment. The response from the seminars was "meh" but they said they absolutely want to go back next year.
This year we had our first female driver/operator in our teams history and had a very close bid for another female. Previous years our driver try-outs has never been close to a female student earning their spot. We also had a much higher percentage of our female students in lead roles including both of our student leads being female and a higher percentage of females in the pits. Is this 100% due to Indy-Rage? Of course not but I do believe that this sparked some motivation for my female students to take it upon themselves to step up and strive to assert themselves as equals in our program.
Make whatever opinions and observations you want from my post All that I care about is that my female students benefited from the experience and want to go back. Because of this I would like to thank Indy-Rage for providing this opportunity.
|
Tyler, this is really great feedback from someone who is looking to improve the experience of the students on their team.
One challenge of FRC is the limited number of slots for any given aspect of a typical FRC team, especially when it comes to drive team/pit team/scouts, etc. At a given competition, a typical FRC team will have between 6-8 students in the pit and drive teams combined. Given FRC teams can be much larger in size, many students simply do not get the chance to participate in some areas of the team during the regular season. This isn't a bad thing, just one challenge of FRC specifically.
This is why I really value off-season events like Indy-Rage. I place a high value on giving more students more chances to play with robots. This is also why I love events like Madtown Throwdown, where we can bring three robots to play with. We get to circulate more than three times as many students through a lot of these roles that they won't experience during the regular season.
More opportunities, if structured wisely, means more opportunities to inspire more students. I think the direction we are headed in FIRST and competitive robotics is a great one. Every year, the net gets bigger and we bring in more students from all backgrounds. From my perspective, casting a bigger net has and will continue to naturally close the gender gap, but I also think events like Indy-Rage play a much needed role in accelerating our growth as a community.
Thanks all,
-Mike