I'm the chief mentor to 1311 Kell Robotics in Marietta. We are the team just down the street from the well known 1002 CircuitRunners of Marietta.
I could write a book on the issue of girls in robotics but I will try to hold it to a few key points. I also think the Kell - CircuitRunners (Wheeler High) scenario is a great study in two perfectly valid, yet very different ways to run a team.
Wheeler is an engineering and science magnet school. They draw students from all over the district, including our school, Kell High School. Their students are more likely to enter a team with some technical background and experience. Many FRC teams are like this, with experienced members working hard to do most if not all of the robot design and build, and the students take great pride in this. And rightly so.
The team I mentor is managed a little differently. A poor comparison would be like how a Habitat for Humanity build site is managed. If you have ever done H4H, you will see that you really don't have to know anything about building a house, in order to build the house. There are people working to make sure that the volunteers get to work immediately upon arrival.
We do several things to recruit and retain girls. First we talk about retention. Once they arrive in the shop, we immediately put them to work building or creating something. It is important that the senior team members, team leaders, and mentors keep the ball rolling so this can happen. You are trying to create a member that is "vested". If they leave that first day having built or contributed something, they are much more likely to return to make sure someone doesn't screw up their work, plus the general satisfaction of having really made something cool and different probably for the first time in their life.
Doing all this requires a few things of mentors and senior members. They have to allow the newbies to make some mistakes and burn up some material. They have to really be on the ball and provide bite sized tasks for the students to accomplish daily. It is also helpful to pair up mentors and high experience team members to mentor to the newbies and let the newbies do the work. That can be a little tough for high experience members to do.
You have to allow that you may not make the perfect robot. After all, what is your goal? To make the perfect robot, or have an impact on peoples lives? There is a tendency to make the robot the goal of this exercise. The robot is a lot of fun, but isn't the real reason FIRST exists.
I have to tell you a story here, a very important story. Because of our team goal was to seed 10th or higher at the regional. We also chose to not be a super bot, but just do something, anything well, and we also choose to spend time focusing on other things.
Because of this, we built a simple reliable rampbot. We seeded 9th, and was a regional finalist. It was because of the KISS principle. It required zero maintenance during seeding and during the elimination. The only thing done was we riveted a simple stiffener bracket between seeding and eliminations. The robot was so simple, we could not hang tubes. So it was do nothing and be a ramp, or try some defense. We tried defense, and got so good at it that we shut down some very awesomely powerfully tube hangers. We had a tube hanging gizmo but threw it aside 2 days before shipment. If we had kept our tube hanger on the robot we would have fiddled around with that piece of junk and distracted ourselves trying to play offense and wound up not doing anything well.
But back to your point, what started as a group of well mentored atomic operations executed by totally inexperienced newbies evolved into a well disciplined high performing team. The team leadership is entire girl. The robot is 2/3 built by girls., as is the team membership.
Closing back to the top of this posting, we started with the goal of immediate engagement, by having newbies start out building or doing something simple, and step by baby step, moving forward until we arrived as a regional finalist, with a Chairman's Award, and the UL Safety Award. It is a form of project management that gets you there. Don't overwhelm newbies with inexperienced newbies with challenges way more difficult than they can handle. The senior members/mentor need to handle that but always with the goal of raising up newbies into new senior members.
At the beginning of our build season, much of the team didn't even know what a crimp connector was or the difference between a bolt and gear. At midseason, they stopped and spent a 14 hour day mentoring to another team to build their robot and get them caught up equal to us at that midpoint. No chalk and talk, but hands on intensive learning. Our students were mentoring to students from another team.
I'm getting way off point here, but we are giving a presentation at the FIRST conferences in Atlanta this Thursday at 12 noon in Room C307 on the issue of recruiting girls into robotics and engineering.
From the conference notes, here are a things to think about
:
VESTING: give newbies an opportunity to go home that very day and say "I made something really cool" (it has to be cool in their mind, not yours)
THE JUNGLE: like the jungle guide might say, when you invite a girl to attend a meeting, tell them they might get to see a real nerd, but don't worry, they are harmless
GUEST DAY: Invite girls to participate in a wide range of no-obligation one day team efforts as guests or affiliates.
MENTOR/COACH: Mentors need to make sure that newbies are not swept aside or ignored. Much like H4H, make sure that newbies do something rewarding and constructive.
ASK: Asking a girl to try robotics sometimes works. Putting the robot in the school lobby is not an recruiting effective tool.
SCHOOL SUPPORT: Ask the school to have a different teacher attend the build session every day, so that a lot of teachers will see what is going on. Teachers can be effective career influncers and motivators for some students.
NUMBERS: In a typical high school music program like band and orchestra, only 5% enter college with intentions of a music related major. Many robotics organizations recruit by inviting students to be an engineer. That is a little like asking a girl to marry you when you should be asking her out for a 1st date to go to a movie. My point is stop trying to turn them into an engineer at first contact.
You want to get them involved at a level they can be comfortable with. At best maybe they will get a PhD in engineering. If you do this right, maybe at worst they will have a total blast, and become a lifelong supporter of FIRST and education as it relates to science and math, etc.
Let's run some numbers. If you have 20 members on a team, the most you can get is 20 engineers. If you treat these 20 members as future career influencers, the effect is exponential. Each member will statistically influence 2.3 to hundreds of kids in the future, potentially creating hundreds of engineers.
TRIBALISM: Considering using the brand image of the school to support the team. With all due respect to our friends at Wheeler and many other schools, Kell has draped itself and promotes the school brand image. Same mascot, colors, cheers, etc. Just like football, soccer, and all the other sports.
Checkout this link:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...highlight=1311
sorry for the rambling essay but it's late.
I want to EMPHASIZE one thing here. I and the other mentors didn't not build the robot. We taught, and mentored and discussed and argued and cajoled and use the Socratic method and the Flowers method and the Barker method, but the students built this robot.
We don't claim to be experts in anything but you are welcome to attend the FIRST Conferences at noon on Thursday. There is a fee to attend and tickets are available at the event from FIRST.