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Local Girl Scouts gear up to compete in global robotics championship
The Rock n’ Roll Robots team is one of the few all-girl groups to compete in this year's FIRST Tech Challenge in St. Louis, MO.
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Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles
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Sixteen girls from Los Angeles County will be competing this weekend in a global tech challenge taking place this year in St. Louis.
They'll be one of the few all-girl groups to take part in the competition, which takes place April 22-25, and pits teams of students in grades 7 through 12 against one another to build the best-designed robot.
The girls, aged 13 to 18, were drawn from Girl Scout troops from across Los Angeles County. Together, they make up the Rock n’ Roll Robots team, which recently qualified to participate in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Tech Challenge.
Several say they became Girl Scouts just to join the robotics team — the only one from the organization to compete in the challenge.
The girls met on Saturday, April 11, in a small, fluorescent-lit Pasadena High School classroom. Sitting with them was Bae-Max, the four-foot tall robot they built together.
Named after Baymax, the plush android in the animated film "Big Hero 6," Bae-Max looks more like a mini tractor scrappily assembled from spare metallic parts than the animated android from the film.
As fellow team members worked on the programming for Bae-Max or updated the team's website, 13-year-old Britney Gallego tinkered with the robot's parts.
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“We watched ['Big Hero 6'] as a team bonding activity,” she said. “We have been working on Bae-Max since September.”
The robot (and its retractable arm) will be one among an army of machines programmed to execute tasks like shooting Wiffle balls into moving tubes and knocking down kickstands for the FIRST competition.
Two of the girls will be on the sidelines, one in charge of strategizing while the other runs the robot with a modified PC game controller. They'll be competing against 127 teams that are typically a mix of boys and girls.
The FIRST Challenge offers no prize — just bragging rights and the experience of working with a team dedicated to the effort.
The Girl Scouts Of Greater Los Angeles' STE[A]M program
The Rock n' Roll Robots team is sponsored by the Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles' STE[A]M (science, technology, engineering, art, math) program, which includes robotics, video game design workshops, app creation classes and astronomy events.
The STE[A]M program is an attempt to spur girls' interest in traditionally male-dominated subjects like mathematics and science.
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“There’s a lot of males in the the STEM profession,” said Linda Khalaf, a 10th grader who wants to design video games after college. As the team's Rock n' Roll Robotics team's outreach captain, she promotes robotics among kids in local communities. “We give them a little taste of what they could do in the future.”
The girls get a little help from grown-ups. Working professionals from big tech companies such as JPL and Cisco volunteer to mentor the scouts during the 10 hours they meet every week.
Taylor Halsey serves as one of those mentors. Now a California Polytechnic University, Pomona senior majoring in biotechnology, she was part of the same Girl Scouts robotics program when she was in high school.
“It was actually my involvement in robotics that pushed me into pursuing AP Physics and AP calculus,” said Halsey. “Males want to build stuff with their hands, and girls are like that too. But sometimes it’s just hard to break out of that stigma.”
The tide may be turning. A recent study by the Cornell Institute for Women in Science found that female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen for STEM tenure-track university positions than men. The Los Angeles Unified District recently approved the creation of an all-girls STEM school.
The Girl Scout's STE[A]M program is already having the same influence on Halsey's students as it once did on her. Isabella Lau wasn’t all that interested in engineering when she attended a troop meeting in the sixth grade. Three years later, she’s mapped out big plans.
“I want to major in computer programming at UC Berkeley,” Lau said. “I want to be on Google’s design team, mainly because I think that Google Drive and Google Glass are really cool. I want to help innovate and program those things.”
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The girls are beyond thrilled about the competition, according to Halsey, and so is she.
"It will be exciting to see what they are able to achieve," she said.
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