Robot meets girl: Mount Si camp to help girls connect with hi-tech
Published 5:42 pm Thursday, May 31, 2012
A summer camp that includes food, T-shirts and Lego play time and looks good on future resumes should fill up fast, right? It probably would, if it were aimed at a different age group and gender, but the camp that high school teachers Tracy (Petroske) Roberts and Kyle Warren are planning has very specific requirements.
Bots on the Sound, the weeklong camp funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is aimed at fostering high-school-aged women’s interests in science, technology, engineering and math, commonly referred to as STEM.
“It has to be this age group, and it has to be girls,” Roberts said, but not simply because those are the grant requirements. “We’d love to be able to have the opportunity for girls to get out and do this!”
The weeklong camp will feature four robotics challenges that the girls, working in teams, will have to address. Roberts and Warren have developed realistic scenarios for the robotic tasks the girls will complete, starting with the first one, building a robot that will stay on the surface of the water (a small pool set up in a science room at Mount Si High School, which represents the real-world Puget Sound) as it travels out into a shipping lane to rescue a kayaker, and then back. Other challenges include a surface-level search pattern, underwater retrieval, and underwater collection and distribution.
“And at some point, they may decide, ‘ok, our bot is not working,’ and they have to rip their whole bot apart,” Roberts said, highlighting another lesson of the camp, on working together and deciding as a team how to finish a project.
She is also arranging for several successful women scientists to speak during the camp, to show participants what’s possible for them. Roberts called them “amazing engineers and biologists,” adding “They’re pretty and normal and super-approachable. Plus, they’re moms!”
Each day of the camp, July 23 to 27, will begin and end with a short quiz on the computer, Roberts said. It’s a way for the National Science Foundation to gather feedback on the camp and participants’ learning. “The kids don’t even realize it’s a survey,” she added. “It’s more like, ‘so, what do you know about this?'”
The camp will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, and is open to any girl going into grades 9-12 in the fall. Cost for the camp is $150 per participant, but Roberts said the grant included scholarship money, so anyone interested should sign up. Registration is online, at http://botsonthesound.weebly.com.
