Girls robotics has had quite the season! Read more to see how they did at NorCal’s.     

Amanda Crisci | Staff Reporter
Staff photo by Lauren Yang
 

In February, the girls robotics team attended the American High School Qualifier and won the Inspire Award for best overall team, allowing them to move on to NorCals and made it to the semi finals of their division placing 9th. Last year the girls team was comprised of four girls, but expanded this year to include 9 members and the overall club increased to include three separate teams: a girls team, a boys team, and a freshman team. The robotics league works similarly to a sports league, as each team will compete with a number of robotics teams from local schools, and advance to NorCals and beyond.

Robotics has been a popular science elective offered by Menlo for years, but was just recently expanded by adding a club. The club was created last year by sophomore and team captain Lauren Yang in order to give students who weren’t taking the class an opportunity to be involved in robotics. “The club is learning based so even if you aren’t in the class you can come in with absolutely no experience and learn robotics while having fun and competing,” Building Lead Niky Arora said.

All three of the teams spent the first quarter of the school year practicing their robotics skills in preparation for their league, First Tech Challenge (FTC), to release the challenge they will build a robot for. This year the challenge was to create a robot that could pick up balls of various sizes and place them into tubes. While the freshman and boys team did not qualify past league, the girls team qualified for the NorCal competition and became one of the three all girls teams represented in a total of over 50 different teams.

One of the biggest difficulties that the all girls team faces is the stigma of being female in the STEM field. “A lot of people have stereotypes against girls teams. They think that we don’t have as good as a robot or worse, someone built our robot for us,” Yang said. In fact, during the NorCal competition one team member got stopped by a boy from a rival team and asked her if she was lost, assuming she wasn’t competing. “We [always] have to prove that an all girls team is not that much different than a co-ed team or an all boys team,” Yang said.

In addition to their goals for improving skills and being more efficient, the team hopes to encourage more girls to get involved in STEM subjects like robotics. “This year we made a lot of progress encouraging girls, and we hope to do that even more next year through helping the middle school robotics team,” Arora said.

The Robotics club is open to anyone who is interested in joining, regardless of prior experience. If you are interested in joining the team, you can contact Yang with questions.