DEL.ICIO.USChanging the ratio: Some female students are bucking stereotypes by taking part in a competition to design working robots.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/18/08
Ally Whalen resisted when her biology teacher kept insisting that she attend a robotics tournament.
Corynne Leduc, a fellow student at Kell High School in Cobb County, attended the school's robotics club meeting only because the girl giving her a ride home was going.
 Mikki K. Harris/AJC | ||
| Ally Whalen, a junior at Kell High School, waits on deck with other drivers during a practice session at the FIRST Robotics Competition at the Georgia Dome on Friday. More than 300 teams from around the world are competing. | ||
 Mikki K. Harris/AJC | ||
| Grace Williams (right) and Meredith Kolff of Westminster High School chat with members of other teams during the competition. 'There's a sense of community' among competitors, Williams said. | ||
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Thursday, the two juniors were at the Georgia World Congress Center, helping ready the Kell robot for the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship, an annual international competition held this weekend at the adjacent Georgia Dome. Leduc is, in fact, a team captain.
"I think we're all nerds at heart," Whalen said.
"This is the right place to bring out the nerd," Leduc said.
The 8,600-student tournament, which assembles the best robot-designing high schoolers from across the United States, as well as Brazil, Canada, Israel and Mexico, is heavy on boys.
The ratio of boys to girls in the contest historically has been 74-26, according to a spokeswoman for FIRST — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — a nonprofit organization founded by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.
Still, more young women like Whalen and Leduc have found it a place where it's OK to like math and science and think robots are cool.
"As girls see our team has girls, they don't feel it's odd to be interested in science and technical stuff," said Suzy Crowe, a teacher at Milton High School in north Fulton County. That team's gender ratio is only slightly in favor of the guys.
Milton and Kell are among a handful of metro Atlanta teams; Carver, Norcross, North Gwinnett, Peachtree Ridge, Roswell and Westminster high schools also are among the entrants. The competition begins Friday and ends Saturday.
This year, teams were challenged to build robots that could pick up a sphere slightly larger than a yoga ball from an overhanging rack and then carry or push it around a course.
In the Milton team's first couple of years, the only females who participated were girlfriends of team members. Crowe, a computer science and math teacher, jokes that she had to "harass" girls into joining.
That hasn't been a problem at Westminster, a team in its first year that was started by two female students, Meredith Kolff and Grace Williams, and whose sponsor is Valerie Bennett, a physics teacher with a doctorate in mechanical engineering.
Kolff came to last year's competition with Bennett and was "blown away and decided we needed a team, [and] came back and recruited Grace."
Kolff said she has learned plenty about "electronic stuff and drive trains."
Williams is helping to start teams at other schools, including at Westminster's sister school in Kenya.
"I don't feel like a tomboy at all," Williams said. "FIRST is something I can do being me."
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