April 3, 2015
Typically, females aren’t widely involved in any robotics or Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) activities, clubs or careers. But iBots Team 6127 is looking to break that stereotype through its competition and its community outreach program.
The robotics team is one of the few teams that is composed mostly of girls, with eight girls and five guys. The team, composed of students from the Rockwood district, participates in FIRST Tech Challenges (FTC) by building robots to be judged and to then compete against other team’s robots.
“We’re in the FTC (second highest level of competition), where our robots are ‘little monsters.’ They’re 18″x18″x18″ creations,” freshman member Shwetha Sundarrajan said.
Recently, the team has dominated at its competitions.
The team beat the odds when getting a late start for the qualifying competition, yet the team still qualified for State. Then, the team went on to qualify for the North Super Regional Championships at State.
The team focuses on building robots and the mechanisms within a robot to accomplish different tasks. At meetings, the members split their large group into smaller groups to focus on each aspect of the robot to ensure success.
Some of the groups are responsible for programming and others for the robot itself, the engineering notebook or on working on the community outreach aspect of the club.
The community outreach is one of the aspects of the club that sets it apart from other robotics teams. Its outreach program is called “Girls in FIRST,” where the members try to recruit more girls to come participate in STEM activities.
Some of the members of the team noticed that as they went up levels in difficulty in the program, girls started to disappear. Teams started as 50/50 gender divides in the beginning level, but as the levels went up, it became a “rarity to find a girl on a team,” according to team member freshman Shruti Natarajan.
“We saw this and we were thinking ‘Why is this happening?’ and ‘We wanna change this.’ There’s definitely a correlation because only 25 percent of all STEM jobs are held by women,” Natarajan said. “So we’re coming up with different programs and reaching out to other [iBots] teams to see how we can counteract this problem.”
“One of the main problems is girls don’t know about the higher levels. There also might be an intimidation issue because there is a pre-concieved notion that it is stereotypically a guy thing,” Sundarrajan said. “It’s scary because in FLL (the lower levels), you’re dealing with tiny lego pieces, while in FTC you’re working with actual pieces of metal, screws and tools.”
The robots they create are made from pre-packaged parts along with a mix of other materials that one can find at the local Home Depot or Lowe’s. The robots have to be created and programmed basically from scratch to complete an obstacle course.
Obstacle courses are based around a theme and require robots to compete in a series of tasks. Completing tasks earns the teams points.
This year for the North Super Regional Championship, the robot had to roll onto a ramp, hook onto a rolling ball and pulling it onto the ramp (the team’s specialty) and knock over a kickstand to release a cascade of different sized whiffle balls that the robot had to put into different goals.
All of this can be achieved with either pre-programmed robots or with remote control robots.
Sadly, the team did not qualify for the National tournament but still did well overall. It was the team’s first time attending a Super Regional Competition, so everyone was excited to be there regardless.
There also weren’t a lot of mostly-girl teams there, so team was unique in that it was one of the few to defy the gender barrier typical of STEM topics at the competition.
Anyone who wants to join iBots can talk to the people mentioned in the story or go on the iBots website: http://ibots6127.weebly.com/.
There’s also a YouTube channel that has overviews of each competition: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOwk9NM5ZaLd1vs3xv09Keg/videos.
The Super Regional video will be up soon, according to Natarajan.
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