Girl Power: Making Impact Through Innovation

Transcription

1 Girl Power: Making Impact Through Innovation As a veteran of the Space Cookies and as a founder of Renegade Robotics, Girl Power" is a way of life for my team. Girl Power is the way we approach problems, deal with failures and how we innovate and create. VEX creating an initiative around Girl Power is a great way to get girls to raise awareness of robotics as a sport. And why not? Robotics is not just about building robots. It s about community, teamwork, resilience, innovation and impact. Girl Power: Fun and sisterhood with Renegade Robotics I have always been on an all-girl robotics team. As an eighth grader I joined the Space Cookies. I then founded Renegade Robotics with some of my teammates. We soon realized that we needed team members with diverse interests, backgrounds, and skills, to help us to optimize our achievements. When we decided to add two new team members, we looked at our combined skills and interests, and then recruited girls who could contribute in programming and drive team; areas where we needed depth to help us meet our goals. Our differences in personalities and outside interests make our team diverse. My team also has a spread of cultural backgrounds and coincidentally (or not!), one of the things we all

2 have in common is that we are all Girl Scouts. These combined interests and common values have lead to our team making community service and helping others an absolute priority. Girl Power is using all of our different strengths in order to change the world for the better. By using our different backgrounds, we can collectively help more people more than as individuals -- making friends while helping others. Rooted in our collective Girl Scout experience, our team members have undertaken a wide range of projects to meet needs in our local community. These projects, such as a developing a STEM summer camp now used in 5 family homeless shelters; creating a bike infrastructure transportation system for a homeless adults; constructing a building to house a Children s Counseling Center for a family homeless shelter; organizing an annual STEM fair and family night at a local elementary school; and founding a VEX robotics team at a middle school, were all lead by girls on our team, and resulted in improving our local community. Girl Power: Making an impact with a Children s Therapy Center One specific example of Girl Power in action was when I helped make an impact at a local homeless shelter. Learning that a local shelter needed a dedicated on-site space for therapy, I took the initiative to build from the ground up a small,

3 stand-alone building to serve as a Therapy Center for children living in the shelter. I learned a wide range of construction skills including how to pour concrete, safely install electrical wires and switches, install insulation and drywall, put down laminate flooring, and install air conditioning. Putting close to 100 hours of work into this project, I learned skills that are essential to construction, project management and helped some of the most needy in my local community. Girl Power: From 18 girls to 10 million My STEM role model is Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of Girl Scouts in 1912 and the original face of Girl Power. She truly believed, even back then, that girls should celebrate their individual growth, character, and self-sufficiency. This Girl Power start-up now has 10 million girls in 146 countries. Starting with 18 diverse girls, Juliette broke boundaries to make sure that all girls could exemplify leadership and be successful. Girl Scouts now have a renewed focus on STEM, with badges, programs and team support, bringing the opportunities of STEM to a new generations of girls worldwide. The four pillars of modern Girl Scouting" is how I define Girl Power: Go-Getter: Trying new things; Innovator: Making our robot better each time we meet; Risk Taker: Not being afraid to fail; Leadership: Using everyone s ideas to create the best possible robot. I feel that Renegade Robotics really embraces the goal of helping others by reaching out to all who are participating in VEX. We have brought our love of robotics to a local public elementary school STEM fair and to over 300 kids in a

4 local homeless shelter summer camp. By targeting different places to teach kids about robotics, we are reaching a more diverse audience and exposing them to it regardless of social or economic background. Girl Power: Sharing robotics with students of all ages. Our special focus on outreach this year is mentoring the rookie team at Outer Island High School (OIHS) on Falalop, Ulithi, Micronesia. We are helping them build their first competition robot by sending them a series of computer drives filled with videos, match tips, sample code, answers to questions, and other information to help them overcome their limited and unreliable internet access. We hope to help them reach their goal of competing in the Micronesia tournament for the first time. Girl Power: Global reach and impact all the way to Micronesia

5 Girl Power: Making Friends near and far Our process as a team is carefully planned. While each girl on our team eventually finds her specialty, one of our goals is to have everyone know the basics of all the sub-teams (website, mechanics, electronics, engineering notebook, and software.) We then create a "specialization" role for each team member, capitalizing on each girl s strengths. As a result, our meetings are more productive and we build a robot that benefits from everyone's ideas in the design phase, and is more solid with specialized sub-teams focusing on implementing the design. While my robotics journey has been enhanced by being on an all-girl team, I have also met boys who have been extremely supportive to my team. Together, we have sometimes scrimmaged/discussed designs/worked through technical problems/planned game strategy as alliance partners and local teams practicing together.

6 Girl Power: Communicating and defining tasks Sometimes, even the craziest idea sparks the greatest innovation. Our best example of this was our star striker on the back of our StarStruck robot. This simple bump tool helped us reliably get stars off the fence in autonomous and during regular match play. This was a solution; a far-flung idea that came as a result of seeing how many stars were still on the fence after practice matches - and that our solution for throwing stars over wasn t good at getting them off the fence, often causing them to fall on our side. Identify a problem + everyone brainstorms = design idea that worked! Girl Power: Helping each other

7 In 2017 Renegade Robotics nominated our coach Leslie Peters for VEX Robotics Mentor of the year. Coach Leslie exemplifies Girl Power in her work with Renegade Robotics. With no background in engineering or robotics, she learned everything from the names of all the VEX parts to how to program in Easy C. During the 2017 VEX World Championships, she received her award (with this surprise nomination) and was the 3rd woman to be inducted into the REC Foundation STEM Hall of Fame. Girl Power: Featured on the Front Page Our local newspaper featured Renegade Robotics on the cover this year. The story, highlighting our success at the World Championships, made us well known in our local communities and generated lots of interest in girls and robotics. We fielded questions from girls wanting to join teams, girls wanting to start teams and shared our enthusiasm about VEX and STEM with all. As a result of this publicity and our outreach efforts we added 2 new girls to the team this year...which is important as some of our founding members will be leaving for college soon!

8 Girl Power: Recognition for our work (and winning awards) When we founded Renegade Robotics we set out with 2 goals: To win an award and to compete at the World Championships. To date we have won 13 awards including Judges Award, Design Award, Excellence Award, the Spirit Award at the California State Championships, and in our second year, first place in the Online STEM Educational Video Challenge, giving us a ticket to World Championships.

9 Girl Power: Achieving goals - Competing at the 2017 World Championships Girl Power and Renegade Robotics has changed my life forever. The relationships, real world skills, travel, new friends in far flung places, fun, frustration, excitement and disappointment have all added to this journey. It s a gift to keep innovating, competing and making an impact! Girl Power: Me