Girls on FIRST teams

[Monochron]

I don't think the girls on our team share your opinion of patronism, but Katie is almost certain to be captain next year. (We're having our election tomorrow *cross fingers*)
While not involved in the actual building of the robot most of our girls exemplify the other aspects to a robotics team. Katie is currently the head of our Scrapbooking sub-team and continues to make fantastic documentations of our year. They work with talking to judges and organizing some community events.

While they are not actively involved in the robot itself they are almost solely responsible for our image and representation of our team (along with one other female mentor)

They don't find it demeaning when commented on, but also don't see their role (and neither do we) as really separate from the team or as if we have allowed them any opportunity. They simply saw what they wanted to do in our team and made it happen.

[falconmaster]

The girls of 842 have commented on their experiences on the differences between when they attend regionals as a co-ed team and a regional as an all girls team.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=56504&page=6

This thread has brought out some interesting things as well.
Take care All.

[ebarker]

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.

[falconmaster]

Originally Posted by Monochron

I don't think the girls on our team share your opinion of patronism, but Katie is almost certain to be captain next year. (We're having our election tomorrow *cross fingers*)
While not involved in the actual building of the robot most of our girls exemplify the other aspects to a robotics team. Katie is currently the head of our Scrapbooking sub-team and continues to make fantastic documentations of our year. They work with talking to judges and organizing some community events.

While they are not actively involved in the robot itself they are almost solely responsible for our image and representation of our team (along with one other female mentor)

They don't find it demeaning when commented on, but also don't see their role (and neither do we) as really separate from the team or as if we have allowed them any opportunity. They simply saw what they wanted to do in our team and made it happen.

The roles that you described are what our girls do traditionally as well and have been outstanding at doing it. In our "little experiment" we wanted the girls to try all the roles. It has been expressed to us over the years, that while they liked doing their "traditional" roles, they wanted to try something else. So we did and we learned a lot!!!!!!!!!!! Basically co-ed teams are not treated the same as all girl teams by many people, at least that was what we observed.

[Erin Rapacki]

Originally Posted by Monochron

While not involved in the actual building of the robot most of our girls exemplify the other aspects to a robotics team. Katie is currently the head of our Scrapbooking sub-team and continues to make fantastic documentations of our year. They work with talking to judges and organizing some community events.

While they are not actively involved in the robot itself they are almost solely responsible for our image and representation of our team (along with one other female mentor)

They don't find it demeaning when commented on, but also don't see their role (and neither do we) as really separate from the team or as if we have allowed them any opportunity. They simply saw what they wanted to do in our team and made it happen.

Hmmm, sounds familiar (happened in my own life!) However, do you think they may gain an interest in building the robot if they were given the chance? Also, if they don't accept the offer... "encourage" them to get involved in some design aspects? Girls are not likely to argue with guys over design, they want to help out where they can, but think... they joined a ROBOTICS team. They are already so close, don't let them miss out on the chance to discover themselves.

Not picking on you specfically, see my posts in the other thread. As a "marketing/program" girl in FIRST for five years, only now discovering that robot design and machining is fun and my design ideas are original and worth something... my new purpose is to make sure the girls on FIRST teams also get the chance to be inspired, and don't sell themselves short like many women in this world do.

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by ebarker

I could write a book on the issue of girls in robotics

I think there is loads of material in these 2 threads for wonderful books on the subjects being touched upon. I would love to see books written from teams' perspectives regarding experiments/experiences/growth/development. Change.

[Ninjitsu Banana]

On Team 461, while we have had, in my four years, more boys than girls, we don't really recognize the gender differences. Tryouts for positions are all conducted based on merit, not on gender...so some years, we've had an all-male drive team, while other years, we've had a co-ed drive team.

If we must make a distinction, then the girls on our team are amazing, especially the resourceful programmers who made us what our driver calls a "sweet autonomous mode." Girls play an important role on WBI, being involved with everything that we do, such as robot construction and the website, and sometimes (as in programming) taking the dominant role.

[Stephi Rae]

I agree completely with all who have already said that it is degrading when people tell you that they are proud of your accomplishments because you are a girl, and there aren't enough women in the industry.

1983 is a rookie team, and we have three girls on the team. However, I was the only one who took an active role. One girl didn't show up until the last two meetings before our first regional, and the other had minimal participation and helped a (very) small amount with our practice chairman's award entry. I was responsible for the entire design and construction of our electrical system, as well as putting together our chassis and assisting with the drive train. Electronics have mildly interested me in the past, but now I can't wait to get started on next years bot! Messy wires is something that drives me crazy, and by the end of it all, with all the last minute changes we made on our bot (completely transforming from ramp bot to arm bot in the last 20 hours before ship) the wires got a little messy. I am proud to say though, that they are still more organized than most teams that I have seen.

Our school as a whole is a science, math and technology school in itself, so there is no lack of interest in the team (now). After we came home with a regional win in Las Vegas, almost all 270 some students that aren't on the team yet, are all begging to join. The issue about recruiting girls to the team is that our school itself is only about 20% female. Of our 18 FIRSTers, 3 are girls. That's already almost the same persentage of our school as a whole. Our recruiting, we have now realized, needs to come straight from the middle schools. We are a public school, but you have to apply to get in. We have recruiting teams that go out to the middle schools, but there isn't much robotics info going out. That's our next step in stepping up our game and becoming the best team we can be. Not just with recruiting girls, but with all the potential super nerds like us out there.

[Philip W.]

Originally Posted by Kelly

This thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=56504
I, quite frankly, find it patronizing when people congratulate me for pursuing engineering because "there just aren't enough women in math and science." It makes me feel like they think my abilities are only noteworthy in the context of my gender, while I would like to think that I would be considered smart no matter who I was.
This is an issue I'm interested in, and I'm curious to hear insights from girls on other teams.

When people congratulate you for pursuing engineering, they are not congratulating you on your abilities (not that your abilities are bad) but your decision to pursue engineering. Such a decision is definitely worth being proud of. For whatever reasons (which I can rationalize but will not mention), women are still intimidated by a career in science, math and technology, and engineering especially. You, and the many other women in FIRST, have deviated from the norm and jumped into a field dominated by men. This bravery deserves its congratulations.

[Jimmy Nichols]

I'm a third year mentor on Team 1038 and since I have been involved with the team, we have tried to increase our female membership each year. This year we reached 33% female membership and next year our entire leadership group will be females. The ones that I have personally worked with are strong leaders and I expect great things from them. I am looking forward to next year and seeing these young ladies take over the leadership of our team.

[Molten]

I wanted to throw in the dynamic to you girls who do not like to be given special treatment. If you were given a full ride because you were a girl engineer, would you accept it?

[Anastasia]

Originally Posted by Temper Metal

I wanted to throw in the dynamic to you girls who do not like to be given special treatment. If you were given a full ride because you were a girl engineer, would you accept it?

Hypothetical situation: If I got a scholarship, and was later told that I only got it because I am a girl, I would be very upset, especially if I took away a scholarship from someone who deserved it more, based on merit. Had I got it because I actually was the best applicant, that's another story.

It's all about the attitudes like these that people have towards gender equality, and it's a very controversial topic in all areas [off topic]anyone else hear of the possibility of men AND women military draft if women want 'equal treatment'?[/offtopic].

[lenergyrlah]

I am a senior & this is my first year doing FIRST because I hadn't heard about it before. This year our team has 13 students & 4 are girls.

I know that our team is small & so my experiences may be a little skewed but our team basically let everyone do what they're best at. Now we have a small team so everyone helps build the robot to some extent. But in general i noticed that most of the girls on the team spent a little more time on the less-mechanical side of the team -- artwork, making pins, fundraising, etc. some more than others.

Now I am an entirely different story. I am not at all into artwork and I hate fundraising (even though I've done it). I love doing mechanical stuff, so I was put in charge of building our ramp (which BTW is really cool -- it's made out of aircraft flooring, it is pneumatic, & it's double-jointed so we have a shallow ramp for 12" & are still only 4 ft. tall). And then other stuff I just kind of did because nobody else was doing it (rules expert and scout captain), so I am also one of our tactitians/coaches.

Occasionally some of our team would joke about all the other girls making pins & me testing a ramp. But I don't feel "non-girly" because I'm covered in aluminum dust & have loctite all over my hands. I'm just having fun doing what I like. & if there's anyone else on our team who is better at doing whatever I'm doing I'll let them.

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by Erin Rapacki

Hmmm, sounds familiar (happened in my own life!) However, do you think they may gain an interest in building the robot if they were given the chance? Also, if they don't accept the offer... "encourage" them to get involved in some design aspects? Girls are not likely to argue with guys over design, they want to help out where they can, but think... they joined a ROBOTICS team. They are already so close, don't let them miss out on the chance to discover themselves.

We have one girl actively involved on building the robot because she wanted to. She does a good job, but nobody really sees it as "wow, that girl is good at robotics" but more as "That student did a good job with that arm."

It almost seems in your post (and I'm sure this was not your intention at all) that you are portraying girls as objects that you have to initiate into engineering. We certainly give them the chance to work on the robot but its just not their thing.
Its more like "We have 5 students on our team who don't work on the actual robot; 3 happen to be girls."

There's no real difference in opportunity, they just chose not to do that aspect of the team.

[thegathering]

Our team, both as rookies and this year, has numerous girls. I know that at least seven were regularly working on our team on the website, business, and management aspects of the team and one that worked with the building of the robot.

Our team is pretty good at taking a diverse sample of people from the school as our IT school represents a large number and diversity of students interested in the program.

Of course, the most important girl (or woman) of all on our team is our team leader/head mentor, Mrs. Drake.