Getting your player ready...
The St. Mary’s Academy all-girls robotics team, SMAbotics, is in its third year and is ramping up for the Rocky Mountain BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) Competition later this month. The SMAbotics team began with just a handful of students and the team now has 26 girls on its roster. While goals from years past included performing well in the competitions and gaining recognition, the true success has been the camaraderie of the girls faced with difficult feats and deadlines.
Alumna Morgan Wagner, now pursuing her engineering degree at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, shares that she joined the SMAbotics team as a sophomore with no prior knowledge, because she “enjoyed building things.” She attended several meetings to learn about C programming, how to use power tools, working with her teammates to build “numerous poorly executed robot prototypes.” Their two days a week after school grew into a club meeting nightly, late into the evenings the week of their first BEST competition. Wagner forbade the girls from using the phrase “good enough,” which added several hours of building and programming before competition day.
Though the performance of their first robot wasn’t exemplar, their scoring in areas of research, presentation and marketing contributed to their overall score qualifying them for regionals. The growth of the team, their skills and their robot continued through much sweat and tears, encouraging them to participate in a larger and higher-skilled FIRST competition later that year. Just like the BEST competition, the teams were made up of 75 percent males, and the quarter of females were typically not coding or driving the robots. Again, their perseverance and tireless work in the workshop took hours upon hours. Their robot was built from original materials requiring them to measure precisely, cut wood and metal pieces, weld and assemble them. Programming required complicated commands, including moving a mechanical arm three-dimensionally, then gripping items before placing them in specific locations. They won best Rookie Team and qualified for Worlds. Wagner was elated.
As Wagner reflected on her SMAbotics experience, she highlighted several favorite moments and vacillated between what were personal successes and what were those of the team. Wagner shares, “In that moment I understood what all of those late nights and Saturdays I spent at school were really for. It wasn’t about winning or making some sort of impact on the world. It was making an impact on the girls at my school. We were changing how they saw STEM fields for women. The girls on the team and at my school were realizing that engineering isn’t just motors and train tracks.”
Though the number of girls taking math courses has increased from 13 for every male to 3, this does not translate to women enrolling in STEM courses. As stated in the AAUW (American Association of University Women) whitepaper “Why So Few,” research reflects that “to diversify the STEM fields we must take a hard look at the stereotypes and biases that still pervade our culture.”
St. Mary’s Academy provides the agreeable space. Wagner says, “We had amazing teachers behind us. We are on the front lines of a revolution.”
– Contact St. Mary’s at 303-762-8300, or visit smanet.org.
