Quote:
|
Originally Posted by woody
The scoring system isnt rigged... its an incentive to bring more girls into the competition and provide them greater roles within the teams.
|
The OCCRA leadership and Oakland Schools is sensitive to gender equity. The number of female engineers in the real world is quite low compared with the male engineers. The effort here is to encourage each team to seek out the female within their school population and demonstrate how much fun building robots can be. Applying all the math and science concepts to a hands on project may just be the spark needed to propel them into engineering as an education choice.
Having the event be part of the regular schedule puts greater emphasis on the importance from the very start of the season. No longer an afterthought, the involvement of the female in the entire team concept from start to finish was the goal.
We stand behind our decision as a good one. Having 4 events and counting the best 12 matches takes into consideration a team that has no females and keeps them competitive in the other three events.