Girl Power

Our Secret Project: Allie and Our Experiences With Discrimination

We have been working on another robot to improve our building, programming, and driving skills. This was supposed to be an only girls challenge, and our secret. We would stay later to work on it, and the boys weren't supposed to find out. We built Allie, one of the robots you are able to get the instructions online to build it. 

Our robot Allie!

 While building Allie we found some problems. One problem was that the legs weren't in sync so we thought of using gears to make the legs stay in sync. While we were driving Allie, the robot would go all over the place, and it was very challenging to drive. We also discovered that the head kept falling off. Unfortunately, we are still working to fix this problem. We have tried to reinforce the head, by adding standoffs, but that failed. We now have built a platform out of VEX IQ pieces and now it is more stable. Occasionally, the head will fall off, but the platform with standoffs is better, and more stable. We are trying to see what we can do to fix this problem, but for now this will do. Since we added in the platform, Allie now looks like a crossbreed between an alligator and a dog. So, now, Allie is a... Puppagator! A Puppagator is a puppy and an alligator. Eventually, the boys found out about our secret project.

Our Experiences With Discrimination

While we were building Allie, Levi kept on barging in on us because he didn't believe us when we said we were just organizing our inventory. At least he didn't tell Nate and Isaiah, our other teammates about Allie. Of course, Isaiah found out that we were building something, and he dared Nate to go take a picture of our project. Isaiah didn't think that Nate was going to do it, and later when he was confronted by a very angry Emma, he said that it was "just for Girl Power", and that it wasn't a big deal. Emma had to explain to him about how Girl Power is all about inspiring other girls to participate in STEM, and that it is a big deal. Girls are discriminated against because of their gender. Boys will tell girls to go do the more "girly" jobs like documentation and STEM researcher. Isaiah said "So what?" and Emma was shocked. How could one of our teammates think like this? Girl power is very important, and inspires girls to work hard and do the jobs that are usually taken by boys. If the team was only the three boys, and we weren't on it, then the team would fall apart. Rhea does almost everything, and Emma is usually a peacemaker when our team is fighting. Rhea is an amazing driver, and we have had many matches where if Rhea didn't balance in three seconds, we would not have scored enough points to make it to finals. Rhea is usually able to balance in the 1 minute match period. 

This is our finals match with Lancer Robotics at the State of REACH-North Shore VEX IQ Tournament.

When Rhea didn't balance the boys would get mad and say she didn't try hard enough, and if they were the driver they would have balanced. Rhea always tried her best no matter how stressful it was, and when she didn't balance, it was never her fault. Sometimes the other team's robot would fall off the bridge and they would blame Rhea. How can she be blamed for something like that? Just because she is a girl doesn't mean that she can't be a good driver or that a boy would do better. Rhea also stays super late to work on designing our new robot. She will often stay until 9 or later! People always wonder why she stays so late, but when a boy is there late no one will question it! It's like they only expect boys to be invested in robotics! In fact, over break she gave up a whole day to work on documentation and the our new robot! She was there from 10 in the morning to 9 at night! She ended up finishing our new robot with no help! It's crazy that people, especially boys have the audacity to say that girls don't belong in robotics! Without Rhea, we wouldn't have our first design of our new robot wouldn't exist! Now that's some serious girl power!