Girls on FIRST teams

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by Erin Rapacki

Yes, that's entirely my point! Girls have to be initiated into engineering, and what may seem to be "not their thing" may actually be a layer of extreme interest covered up by a lack of self confidence. Ultimately, once they've gained confidence in their ideas... it won't matter that they're a girl, they'll give technical input no matter what.

It'll be a big push to get the ball rolling, but once it rolls... it flies. Try it.

What I meant was that it seems like you are saying that the only way to get girls involved is to initiate them force them to work on the robot.

Sorry for the confusion.

We do something similar to this but is more of a workshop in every aspect of the team where we force everyone to try each part. Everyone has to put together a scrapbook section for themselves, try some web design, wire some devices, and do actual work on last years robot.

Maybe the girls you attract to robotics are very shy, but the two that now work on our robot came because they wanted to work on a robot, not make designs or marketing assets for a team.
Now with some girls, and many boys on our team, they are intimidated by the prospect of building and would rather work elsewhere in scrapbooking or design. In that case initiation does help, but with the other two girls on our team, working with their hands on the robot isn't fun to them. They joined because their brothers were on the team and found what they do now to be more rewarding than robot work. This is the same with six other boys who do non-robot work as well.

While making them work on a robot might seem more a part of FIRST, they don't find that as fun as the work they do now that keeps their hands quite full.