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Originally Posted by Eugenia Gabrielov
I think one of the best techniques I've seen for this is to let girls start where they want. So what if they want to spend a season working on spirit and promotions? Let them, but be sure to sprinkle lessons of technical stuff they can learn to help the team throughout.
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It is important for every team, regardless if you are recruiting guys or girls, to allow everyone to find their role on the team. Structure to the team will help aid this; creating clear definitions of the jobs that must be accomplished and allowing people to volunteer to do them will get people involved in what interests them. However, I think as Eugenia suggested, it is important to bring the focus back to what FIRST is trying to accomplish, an interest and appreciation of science and technology. If certain roles are fulfilled without much interaction with the technical aspects of the team, than this goal is not really accomplished. The team as a whole should have a working understanding of the robot's functionality and the design concepts that went into the machine. While participating in the engineering is not for everyone, the hard work and thought that went into building the robot should be appreciated by everyone on the team, that is of course why we are here.
But to bring the focus of this thread back to iheartswitch.com, I think interesting approaches to bridging the gap of what is nerdy and typically masculine to more feminine things, more readily embraced by high school girls. These workshops sound like great ideas for building confidence in the shop of rookie members, particularly girls. It has the appeal of an arts and crafts activity that could easily be used for both technical skills as well as team bonding early in the year.