According to spectrumlocalnews.com, a robots engineers are made-up of a dozen high school girls and their robot Electra, is going to be facing their first challenger at their first off-season competition in Chapel Hills this month. Kaitlyn Nolte, a member of G-Force stated, “Our team is super unique in the fact that it’s breaking the mold, and it’s also showing that girls can excel at anything that boys can excel at, I love that I can still be girly, and I can be super into robotics, It’s my No. 1 passion, and it’s something I want to turn into a career field.”
G-Force is a robotics team meant for high school girls interested in fields such as engineering and computer science and is one of only three girls robotics teams in the entire state of North Carolina. Data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau says that women only make up 26 percent of computer scientists and only 15 percent of engineers. Craig Danby a “Battlebots” competitor and mechanical designer is a mentor for the girls and stated that, “There will be a group of boys in the audience around the same age as them, and they’ll look at the robots and think, ‘Oh, I built that, mentor Craig built that.’ No, no, they built that, That kind of attitude, you can see it kind of seeping into the younger kids, and it comes from somewhere and it mostly comes from the idea that girls can’t do this sort of thing, and that is absolutely not true.”
G-Force has received more interest then they expected, however, only so many girls will fit in a garage workshop. The eventual goal is to have their own workspace. Danby stated that, “The great engineers all start in garages building stuff out of what they have, I will help these girls — push these girls — into anything STEM they want to do.”
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