All-Girls Robotics Team Beats the Boys

Some of the nation’s leading scientific minds united to champion a unique education program and a squad of San Domenico students are taking full advantage. A team ofstudents — all female — have bonded together over the design and construction ofrobots, earning awards along the way.

The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) program was founded by Dean Kamen (of Segway fame) and Woody Flowers, bringing together some of the sharpest minds from NASA, MIT, governmental agencies and even the entertainment industry (including will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas). The idea is toprovide students with the opportunity to apply science and latest technologies to creative endeavors, such as robotics.

A dozen young women at (for all but one, English is second language) united to build an actual robot — in just over 260 hours — and bring home acouple of prestigious awards.

Tammy Swanson, mathematics teacher and robotics coach, said the team just concluded its fourth season. “This year, we had 12 girls, representing four countries — Taiwan,Korea, China and the U.S. — participate. All but one of my students was returning members.”

For the students, it’s a labor of love. Most of the team members are already among the top grade-earners and participate in other extracurricular activities ranging from badminton to ballet. Swanson said the school offers “mini-courses” such as robotics and this class met two hours a week.

“They calculated that they spent 262 hours working on the robot this year,” Swansonsaid. “That’s about 42 percent more time than most high school students spend in school per semester. When sports and other extracurricular activities are added to the mix, my team spent about twice as much time in school as the average student.”

While she offers suggestions and discusses strategies with her team, Swanson said the students do all of the heavy lifting. “In the end, every decision is theirs. They learn by ‘failing and fixing’ — no one builds a prototype correctly the first time; we all have to learn from our mistakes and come back stronger — that's my philosophy.”

Swanson said the program provides something beyond the basic curriculum. “None of these girls have backgrounds in engineering because most high schools do not offer a curriculum in this area. The Robotics program gives them exposure to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in an exciting format. The goal is to inspire, encourage and instill confidence and creativity in each of them, and as a team. When you see them strategize, adjust, network and compete at events, you know they are going totake these skills with them into the world when they graduate — textbooks alone can’t dothat.”

The team enjoyed a successful season. They competed with 14 other teams at the 2010 Northern California Qualifying Tournament in November at Menlo School inAtherton. “Team Genesis” (Janice Cho, Rita Hu, Sherry Hung, Kim Lin, Sandra Liu,Joanna Lu, Erica Wang and Jody Wung) won the Inspire Award, FTC’s most prestigious honor, and was invited to the Championship Tournament at Newark Memorial High School in January with the top 28 teams from Northern California. Team Genesis also won the Think Award at the championships, recognizing team that best manages and documents design engineering process. Judges chose San Domenico because Genesis recounted plans and successes, as well as struggles and lessons learned. Finally, TeamGenesis paid tribute to its competition experience in an iMovie, which was presented in a school-wide assembly.

The team collaborated to field a few questions, with Ting-Chun (Janice) Cho, serving as spokesperson.

PATCH: What attracted you to the robotics team?

TEAM GENESIS: Come on, it’s Robotics, isn't that enough? It’s attractive all by itself! Building a robot without clues? Driving a robot and fighting each other? Cool!

PATCH: What are the most exciting/ interesting aspects?

TG: Really getting to know your teammates and seeing how other teams show up to the competition with different solutions for the same game is very interesting. There were some days that the entire team stayed up the whole night together sharing tears and joy, struggling and having fun together. There are not many other events that are like FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), learning things in STEM but also facing challenges with positive attitudes, and how to work as a team.

PATCH: Why is this program/team important to you?

TG: Before participating in FTC, I never imagined that science and math could solve real world problems. I was never better than other students at math or science, and they were not necessarily my favorite classes. However, after joining Robotics and enjoying myself, I found that I became more curious about how math and science are used to solve problems while building actual robots. I used to think Robotics was only for geniuses, but now I know it is for anybody who wants to have fun!

Moreover, since San Domenico high school is an all-girls school (and all the team members were girls), FTC was even more meaningful because we faced and overcame so many challenges that we never thought we would be able to solve by ourselves as young women. We put ourselves out there, competed with other teenage guys (about 90 percent are boys) and also won two incredible awards — so unimaginable and COOL!

The process of building a robot with a team that is qualified to compete with so many other amazing teams within the state was a life-changing experience; the experience that FTC provides us was like no other.