Girls Like Bots; Providing Inspiration in a Male-Dominated Industry

After receiving the Inspire Award at the First Tech Challenge State Championship on March 12,  the Notre Dame Academy robotic team is prepared to compete in the World Championship at the end of the month.

First Tech Challenge has become a nationwide competition for Grades 9-12 to show off their robotic prowess.  Notre Dame Academy in Hingham is only one of four Bay State teams that will compete in the World Championships in St. Louis on April 27- 30.  

Not only have they  constructed a robot capable of competing on a national level and mastered the complicated computer language required for robotic control, but they are also the only all-female team that competed in the state. Notre Dame Academy is a single-sex school and are competing under the name of Girls Like Bots.

On March 12 in the state competitions, under the supervision of faculty members Mark Pumphrey, Steve Joyce and Betty Cheyne, the girls took on 24 other (mainly male) teams and took home the Inspire Award for best overall team, earning themselves an automatic invitation to St. Louis.

Robotics at Notre Dame is an extra-curricular activity and has formed part of student life for three years. The First Tech competition begins in September when the teams receive their kits and competition rules are strict.

“We are bound by the limitations of the kit,” advised Pumphrey, who teaches physics at the school, “there are only certain motors you can use, certain pieces of metal, certain gears…this year they added a tractor drive.”

The limitations didn’t stop Girls Like Bots from constructing “a reliable robot”. Comprising of girls drawn from different grades, the team made sure to keep to the engineering maxim of KIS; Keep It Simple. The result was a robot that was able to gather plastic batons, travel over varying terrain and deposit them in scoring positions which allowed the team to win enough points to advance in the competition before winning the award.

“The Inspire is the biggest award they give” smiled Steve Joyce, another member of the advisory faculty team, and he admits that the simplicity of the robot was a huge advantage in securing the honors for Notre Dame. “ Don’t make it a complex machine because a complex machine breaks down,” Joyce said, adding that “it’s just good engineering, making something that’s going to last.”

There is no doubt that the success of Girls Like Bots has highlighted a growing need for women to enter the engineering space. The industry is still male-dominated with 85% of engineers being male and only 20% of engineering degrees nationwide being awarded to women.

For many companies that are looking to hire women in order to meet their quotas, there just aren’t enough graduates to fill the spaces and this is a situation that Notre Dame are very aware of. The Robotics club prepares the girls for a career in engineering and the success in the State championship is vindication for the hard work put in by the faculty.

Next step for these budding engineers are the World Championships, where Girls Like Bots will be flexing their metal muscles against the cream of the robotics crop. Pumphrey is confident that they will not let themselves or Hingham down, believing that the key to their success will in the reliability of their creation.

“The girls tend to build a reliable robot. Watching the boys, they want to build these complicated robots that do 18 million different things but it doesn’t do a lot of it really well. Sometimes it does and you’re up against a really good robot but, in the three years that I’ve been here, the girls want to make sure that whatever it is that it does, it works.”

Words that can be applied to Notre Dame Academy itself, an educational institution preparing its students for the challenges ahead, even if not all of them will involve robots.