Girls in STEMies Club were very excited to have Robogals UQ students visit. Robogals is a non-profit student group which run free sessions to inspire, engage and empower young women into engineering and related fields.
Daya, Lachlan and Bradley from Robogals very quickly engaged the girls in discovering what engineers do! The girls found out about mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering……. and they became very excited by chemical engineers who could design and make ‘TimTams’!!
After discussing the engineers design process, which is similar to the design process we use in our Makerspace, the girls were soon busy programming EV3’s to travel forward, backwards and spin.
There was plenty of problem solving and debugging code when things didn’t work. Squeals of laughter when robots did very strange things! Finally the girls added code to use the ultrasonic sensor to stop the robot before hitting a wall. Below is a video of Daya discussing code options with two students.
STEMies Club members had a fabulous afternoon learning about the important and varied work engineers do and the possiblities for all girls to get involved in STEM related subjects, like robotics.