Why I support and all girls robotics team.
Why I support an All Girls Robotics team
Back in 2019 I was working for Caterpillar and I was asked if I’d talk to a local robotics team, they put me in touch with a lady named Shannon who ran an all girls FLL team out of her garage.
I went to see them a few times and helped them just a tiny bit along the way before those girls aged out and moved on to high school. Jump forward a little bit and Shannon asked if I’d go speak to a new team some of those girls were on at a local high school. Those girls were now on a huge FRC team with a better workspace than I had for my Battlebots. It was great to see them moved on but it was clear they were swamped by such a big team. The girls I’d seen working so hard on FLL were getting lost in the FRC team. It was disappointing to see but at the time I was just glad to see them still competing.
Not long after Shannon reached out and asked if I’d have lunch with her and their FLL coach Leigh. We sat down and she told me she wanted to start a new team and wanted to have me be a mentor and help them along the way. I’d seen them be swamped in the other team, I knew they could do more than they were being allowed to in their other team. It took just two hot dogs and a coke, I said yes to coming aboard to help.
The way I justified it initially was knowing that worldwide, women make up around 9% of engineers. I can count on one hand the amount of female engineers I’ve worked with. I know you can’t make a change if you sit on the sofa and complain about it. You need to do something. So joining G-Force Robotics was how I was going to help change that. Little by little I was hoping to inspire or coach some of the girls into an engineering field.
The Girls team officially started at a time in my life where I’d become disillusioned with what I was doing. I was struggling to enjoy what I was doing with robots, my hunger for competition was waning and I was starting to think about walking away for a while. Then I met 12 girls who light up my world.
My very first day was showing them how to use a soldering iron, which if you know me and my robots you know it's not something I’m good at so it was a little blind leading the blind but we all struggled through it, next it was showing them how to use the drill press, the mitre saw, basic hand tools from wrenches and socket wrenches to hacksaws and how to use clamps. It was really basic stuff, stuff I’d forgotten that other people didn’t know but they took to it like ducks to water. I had forgotten that people at their age are sponges for information, if you want to learn you pick it up fast, they wanted to learn and very quickly I went from saying “this is how you do this” to, “do you need help to do that?” to hearing “get out of the way Craig I got this”
Their ability to absorb information was astounding, they went from not knowing how to do basic things to helping each other doing them in a faster time than I did at that age. They would look out for each other and help each other. They went from learning the basics to assembling a robot for their first off season competition, which unfortunately fell on the first weekend of Battlebots Championship 7 filming.
I sat in the pits for the first 2 days of filming slowly getting Slammo ready to compete and spending the majority of my time texting Leigh and Shannon for updates on how they were doing. They broke something, they fixed it, they scored X points, they need to do this so they can move on, they can do this so they can do this. Time I should have been spending on Slammo got spent checking in and seeing how they were doing. Late on the second day I got the news that they had won! I was elated but then I had to get Slammo through safety (which we did shortly after)
I came back to a group of girls bouncing with energy and excitement for the future, it was infectious! They made a robot, broke it, fixed it and won. They were inspirational, they made me want to do better, they made me want to work harder. Visiting them twice a week was the best, every time we got together we did more, we learnt more, we achieved more. Christmas came along and I almost didn’t want to take a break. I wanted to keep making robots with them. They were awesome.
On a purely selfish level, being their mentor makes me happy. They’re an amazing group of girls they can achieve so much and I’m so proud to be a part of it. I don’t know how many if any of them will take up engineering roles, some of them could walk into engineering roles right now let alone in a few years after First and after college. Their rate of knowledge growth is outstanding, the girls on the coding side have totally eclipsed me with their ability. The assembly team could easily take on a Battlebot project. The drivers are probably better than I am now, I certainly can’t drive their robot but I feel certain they could drive mine, to the same level I can but probably better. Is that because they have better reaction times than a man in his late 30s probably but we won't talk about that.
Every single time I work with them, I feel better about the world, even on the harder days and the days when we don’t achieve as much as we want to. And the days when we do a lot, and achieve what we wanted to or more, those days are the best. I don’t know if my goal of guiding them into engineering is working, but I see how they are inspiring other girls, I see how they are inspiring themselves, and I have hope. I believe in them, they are the best. That is why I work with them. They make me feel like a better person as a result and I respect them all.
https://www.firstlegoleague.org/
https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc