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Hi FIRST Ladies Readers! We are FRC Team 8717 the Cyber Vipers, based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Our organization was founded 3 years ago and the team has grown greatly since. We are a passionate group of individuals actively exploring the exciting world of robotics. We commit ourselves to promoting more women in STEM fields and celebrating inclusivity and diversity. Our team inspires the next generation of female leaders through our efforts within the FIRST Ladies partnership, and providing learning opportunities in a fun and diverse environment for all! Around half of our members identify as female, and we have a good amount of non-binary members as well. With such capable individuals with varied gender identities on our team, we support everyone in their unique gender expressions and identities in any way we can. By joining FIRST Ladies, we have had the opportunity to work with other organizations supporting women in STEAM such as the m.e. FIRST initiative. We have worked with m.e. FIRST to provide free menstrual products to teams during the Las Vegas Regional and will during the FIRST Championship. Our FIRST Ladies partnership is also a gateway to promote what matters to us to a wider audience: Inclusion and accepting those around us. Our team has various subteams that ensure there is something for everyone. From mechanics to programming to art and design to fundraising, everyone can contribute! We firmly believe in “the more the merrier” and appreciate all of the hard work and collaboration needed to build our robot. In the future, we plan on posting more about all of our FIRST Ladies events and initiatives! We’re preparing so many more posts for you all! 
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Hi FIRST Ladies readers! We are Team 8717, the Cyber Vipers, in Las Vegas, Nevada. For the past 8 years, the value of women in leadership has been continually emphasized at Desert Oasis High School, where our team is based. How have we done it? The Women in Leadership Speaker Series. WHAT IS THE WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP SPEAKER SERIES? The Women in Leadership Speaker Series gives women in leadership a platform to inspire our student population. Our school invites women of all backgrounds to speak about their experiences, ranging from STEAM expertise, to government legislation, and to sports team management. The Series has been run annually since 2016, with the 2024 Speaker Series being the 8th of this event. Our school invites at least one woman in leadership for every school day during Women’s History Month in March. Each speaker is given one hour to have a discussion with an audience of students about their unique challenges and accomplishments. WHY DOES OUR SCHOOL RUN THE WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP SPEAKER SERIES? One of our school’s largest goals is for students to graduate with one of the Three E’s: Enroll in postsecondary education, Enlist in the military, or be Employed. By allowing inspiring women to take center stage to talk about their experiences, they demonstrate how to overcome adversities and successfully pursue their aspirations. These inspiring women don’t just show potential future opportunities; they also empower female students and other underrepresented groups so that they CAN accomplish their dreams. The Speaker Series benefits not only students but also the speakers themselves. All of the speakers are highly accomplished women who get to be further recognized for their success. Additionally, speakers often get to see differing perspectives from our diverse student population. WHO IS INVITED TO SPEAK? The Speaker Series involves women from all walks of life. Some of these phenomenal women include: Stephanie Rogers, the Vice President of the Las Vegas Golden Knights, Dr. Elizabeth Gunn, the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts Nevada State University, and Susie Lee, United States Representative of Nevada’s 3rd District. One of the most notable for the STEAM community is Angela Quick, FIRST Nevada’s Regional Director and FRC Program Delivery Partner. Our team personally invited Angela Quick to participate in this Series due to her immense efforts and dedication to expanding our diverse FIRST program within Nevada. Through sharing her experiences, she inspired a library full of students to pursue STEAM and educated others on FIRST core values. WHY IS THE WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP SPEAKER SERIES IMPORTANT? The Women in Leadership Speaker Series at our team’s school is an incredible opportunity for Nevada’s female leaders to talk about their experiences. But why should it just stop at Nevada? We believe that every woman deserves to have a platform to speak about their incredible journeys. We have hopes that learning about our team and school’s journey with this Series will inspire you to pioneer one in your area. This speaker series was featured on Vegas PBS on Monday, April 8th at 7:30 PM PST. If you are more curious about the specifics of the series, please check it out! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frc_8717_cybervipers/  Through FIRST, students can learn a lot more than just engineering. In a robotics team, communication, writing, and even art and design are key factors for the team to work smoothly. This is one of the ways that FIRST has helped me and many other students to develop soft skills and become a better team player. Communication plays a pivotal role in team dynamics and the professional nature of our team. This skill can help any student during and after their time in FIRST. Whether it’s college or the professional world, the ability to clearly and concisely bring your point across to others is a key skill to have. Leadership is another useful skill in STEM. It helps you and your team to stay on the same page in making important decisions and making sure that every voice is heard. To ensure everyone gets an opportunity to learn, any student can take charge in a project that piques their interest. But being a good leader does not come at the cost of teamwork. In fact, teamwork is an essential part of good leadership. Being able to work smoothly with teammates will positively impact a student’s life in the professional world as well as in day to day life. A few soft skills that are not often thought about are critical thinking, creativity and time management. Critical thinking is very useful in FIRST due to the common challenges of engineering. It helps me to discern the positive or negative qualities between different design options for our team’s robot. Creativity also plays an important role in decision making. By thinking outside of the box, my teammates and I can come up with a myriad of design options to test and prototype. In the professional workplace, creativity and critical thinking are equally as important for making tough choices and testing different options. Time management is a skill that helps me to stay focused during team meetings and helps me to keep myself working on the task at hand. Managing your time properly can be incredibly important in the workplace, especially with tight deadlines or large projects that need to be done. Adaptability is yet another very useful skill to learn. An adaptable person is able to very quickly adapt to changing circumstances and learn new abilities. Continuing to be helpful regardless of the situation ensures that you will always have a job to do and helps the team to recover from setbacks very quickly in order to keep moving forwards. Another soft skill that proves useful in bouncing back from setbacks is work ethic. By setting high standards for myself, I have ensured that I produce quality work for the whole team meeting and that I will always be there to help out in the professional world. Lastly, motivation is a crucial aspect of working hard, alone or in a team. It helps me to set a better work ethic, stay more adaptable, manage my time responsibly, be creative, think critically, lead well and communicate effectively with other members of my team. By applying all of these soft skills I’ve learned in FIRST, I continue to contribute to my team and make sure everyone has a place to be. - Daniel L. Sources Cited: Monique Danao, “11 Essential Soft Skills In 2024”, Forbes.com, 2023  In the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.” As a girl who has been a part of the world of STEM and openly involved in the FIRST Robotics Competition for over three years, my journey and love for robotics has only increased exponentially and my passion to continue robotics not only in school but also university. For me robotics is not only an extra curricular but a passion for me, and for me, I especially love planning outreach events, and involving myself in the community and promoting FRC to girls aspiring to enter the world of STEM, irrespective of their background. My team, is filled with girls and boys, and our number of girls applying to be apart of our team is only increasing rapidly year by year. Team Elev8 is utopia to me, a place of happiness and my home, where I'm glad to be surrounded by girls who stay back in school till 8pm, hard work driven and passionate towards all aspects of robotics. So, if you are someone interested in robotics don’t be shy to join, and if you have any doubts don’t be afraid to message us on instagram - @7539teamelev8 - Aryana B. - Outreach - FRC Team 7539, from Mumbai, India  Radicubs Robotics (FRC 7503, from Frisco TX) interviewed Professor Ouyang from the University of Texas at Dallas, where we asked her questions about the major she teaches and her experience in Computer Science. Below are the questions that we asked her in our interview! Could you tell me a little about yourself, like what you do at your university? I'm an assistant professor of computer science and that means I'm a research faculty and so I teach courses with about a third of my time, and then the rest of the time I spend doing either service for the department, it's the other third, and then the last third is research. So my research is in natural language processing, which is the branch of AI that's dedicated to processing text. What advice would you give to young women trying to pursue computer science and like the other related majors and stuff? I would say that you will probably not see many other women in your classes compared to gentlemen and that's fine. Not fine that there are few, but fine for you. Don't be discouraged. Don't be intimidated, you can be just as passionate and just as good and better than some of the boys at this. Even if you find yourself as the only girl in your higher-level courses, then that just means that you are smarter and more dedicated to it. The other I would say is that this is not specific to computer science, but just in general, you can get the same college education pretty much anywhere you go. The courses are going to be very similar. The degree is similar. The difference is going to be the people that you meet and the connections that you make. In Computer Science, as in any field, the people that you know will help you a lot and will help you go a long way. Who do you know? What faculty are willing to write letters of recommendation for you? What extracurricular activities were you involved in? What kind of industry contacts did you make through them? So don't neglect the networking or the people side and just sort of stick to your books, but also make those connections because it can help you a lot later when you're looking for a job. What drew you to computer science and natural language processing? I took computer science in high school as well. I enjoyed it. I did not intend to do my career about it, I was pre-med. But then this is why I say the people you know make a big difference. When I was an undergrad, my major advisor was an NLP researcher and he encouraged me to do a lot of research internships and to take courses that were related to the topic. He took me under his wing and it just kind of went from there that once I had been introduced to the topic, I enjoyed it. I didn't know at the time, how do you pick your internships? How do you set yourself up for your future career? But that's what he knew about. He pushed me to do the quote-unquote right internships and take the opportunities that would set me up to go to grad school and eventually get an academic career. So I always like to say it was kind of by accident. If I hadn't been assigned to that particular advisor, I probably would have just gone to medical school and not gotten into computer science. But I don't know. For me, it was luck. Could you give us a day in your life of just what you do at your job? So I teach one course a semester, this semester I'm doing discrete math two at UT Dallas. In the fall semesters, I usually teach the graduate NLP course and then in the spring semesters, I usually do discrete one or discrete two. So, I have my course and then I'll do that for an hour and 15 minutes. And then afterward, I'll note down attendance and see if anyone has questions, then write down what I want to say at the next lecture to answer all those questions. Usually, I'll go into a meeting with one of my PhD students and we'll talk about what their research project is going through right now. I have one hour per week with each of my PhD students. They give me an update on what’s done the last week, what progress is made, what are the things that they’re not sure about how to proceed, or any problems encountered. We'll sort of work through those together and make a plan for what they're going to do for the next week, depending on, exactly what's going on. Sometimes it's the research project, sometimes it's the project that is mostly done. We're writing a paper to publish about it, so there might be a lot more proofreading, editing, and discussing how are we going to frame what we're trying to say about whatever it is that we discovered. I'll have two or three of those on any given day, depending on the day. Then, we have to do departmental service. I'm on the Graduate School Admissions Committee, so we'll go and look at the Ph.D. applications and chase down whatever faculty member a particular applicant wants to work with. If it's an NLP applicant, for me, I'll just go ahead and evaluate the application and decide the pros and cons of this particular candidate then there is faculty hiring that usually happens in the spring. Then there's usually going to be a one-hour or so talk from a recent Ph.D. graduate from another university who's hoping to start working as a professor at UT Dallas. We'll go to that and then give feedback for the search committee to decide, what does everyone think about this candidate? Then the rest of the time, which there's unfortunately not very much anymore, I'll usually spend working on my own projects in the research space. So as a faculty member, my job is to sort of manage the lab-level goals. So I'll have individual PhD students who are working on small projects. My job is to think about what is the bigger picture, what are all of us working towards? How do all these projects fit together? What are our overall goals? And then apply for funding from something like the National Science Foundation to propose. And then for my last question, do you have any extracurriculars that you did in high school that you think built your skill set, whether that be in leadership, computer science, or anything like that? My extracurriculars in high school were not geared towards a computer science career because at the time I didn't think I was going into it. I was an EMT and then I was also in police explorers. Those are not particularly relevant to computer science necessarily, but I do think that developing leadership skills is important. If you're going to work in computer science, a lot of times you're working with a team, or at some point as you move up in your career, you'll be managing a team. Knowing how to navigate those kinds of interpersonal relationships and delegate tasks to motivate your team members is important. I would also say this is not something from high school, but something I sort of discovered later in grad school. You might not feel it now because you're in high school, but as you get older, your body starts to not like the fact that you sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day so much anymore. I do think that having a sport that you enjoy is pretty important. It's great to de-stress and it also will sort of combat the negative health effects of our very sedentary job. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theradicubs/?hl=en Ada Lovelace: “Who is known as the father of computers?” This popular trivia, referring to Charles Babbage, dominates computer science quizzes, and yet, little respect is paid to Ada Lovelace, the mother of programming. English mathematician and writer, Ada Lovelace helped revolutionize the trajectory of the computer industry. She was the first to recognize that Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ had a much larger potential than mathematical calculation. She hypothesized that his programming could work with other things besides numbers. The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols according to rules, marked the important transition from calculation to computation, effectively making her the first person to conceptualize a computer. She later worked with Charles Babbage to bring this vision to life and wrote the world’s first computer program. Her ideas were first published in the form of comments written on an article she was translating from French to English on the machine in 1843. Unfortunately, she passed away at the young age of 36 and her contributions to technology weren’t known until a century after her death, especially since mathematics and engineering were not considered appropriate professions for women. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Rivalling Shakespeare’s tragedies, the story of British-born American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is riddled with hardship. Having witnessed the lack of opportunity in England for women in STEM at the time, she pursued a fellowship at Harvard in 1923. In her PhD thesis, she definitively established that stars are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. However, she was dissuaded from this remarkable conclusion by astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who thought that stars would have the same composition as Earth. (Russell conceded in 1929 that Payne was correct.) Despite her remarkable research Harvard refused to grant a doctoral degree to women, thus she obtained her PhD from Radcliffe College. Payne remained at Harvard as a technical assistant after completing her doctorate where director Harlow Shapley had her discontinue her work with stellar spectra and encouraged her instead to work on photometry of stars by using photographic plates (an outdated and inaccurate set of instruments). She was named a lecturer in astronomy in 1938, but even though she taught courses, they were not listed in the Harvard catalogue until after World War II. Rosalind Franklin: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, a discovery for which the foundation was already previously laid by Rosalind Franklin. A brilliant scientist of British origin, Rosalind received no awards for her discovery of the helical structure of DNA and RNA, with the excuse that honors like the Nobel Prize are not awarded posthumously. When she began her research at King’s College she discovered the density of DNA and established that the molecule existed in a helical conformation. She collaborated on studies showing that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) in that virus was embedded in its protein rather than in its central cavity and that this RNA was a single-strand helix. She also studied the chemistry of coal and carbon for the war effort, bringing forth information that proved valuable to the coking industry, All in all, Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant chemist and researcher that went unrecognized by the globe for her efforts for several decades after her death, and today, it becomes our responsibility to honor and spread the word, about women like Rosalind, that dedicated their lives to the advancement of science and technology. By FRC Team 7539 Elev8 from Mumbai, India https://www.instagram.com/7539teamelev8/?hl=en Hi I’m Arcturus S. and I am a part of Team 4085, Technical Difficulties, from Reynoldsburg Ohio. I interviewed Aleyna Dragonette. Aleyna Dragonette is a coach and mentor of Robotics Team 4085, and former Central Project Manager of 4085. Q: How was your time on the robotics team? A: It was something I never saw myself doing. I had no intentions of joining, until one of the coaches approached me and encouraged me to join. I fell in love with it, and it was one of my favorite parts of High School. It was an unexpected experience that I loved. Q: What made you decide to come back as a mentor? A: I wanted to be able to give back to the team that did so much for me. I know how much I appreciated my time on the team, and how much I appreciated my mentors and coaches, and I wanted to do that for the kids now. And because how fun it is, and I missed doing it. Q: How has mentoring the team changed you as a person? A: The biggest thing is because I work with elementary kids, it has taught me how to interact with high schoolers, and how to work with them. It has taught me patience, and how to balance pushing people to be their best, and letting them figure things out on their own. Q: Would you recommend mentoring to other former robotics team members? A: Yes, absolutely, it is a good way if you enjoyed robotics if you enjoyed robotics to get back involved and make a difference in your community, and you have valuable experience to bring as someone who was in it, and that is a different perspective from mentors who weren’t on a team. Q: How has both being on the robotics team and mentoring one impacted you as a woman in STEM? A: It helped me discover skills related to STEM I didn’t know I had before. As someone not pursuing a STEM career, it made me realize I have an impact on STEM, and I can encourage girls to continue being involved in STEM. Website: https://www.techdiff4085.org/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techdiff4085/  A Radicubs (FRC 7503, from Frisco TX) member interviewed our founding member, Caitlin Fukumoto, to discuss the benefits of being on a FRC team, and life after being in FIRST.
What have you been up to since like, leaving robotics and graduating? I go to MIT and I'm studying urban studies and planning. I haven't done a lot of robotics stuff since I graduated high school, but I learned a lot of soft skills from robotics that I use all the time. What advice would you give to students who are considering applying to robotics? It sounds cheesy, but I would encourage students to be themselves and have confidence that they're excited or passionate about doing robotics is sufficient to open that door. Looking back on when I first joined the team that I was a part of before the Radicubs, I was really nervous that I wasn't qualified enough because the application process for that team was pretty intensive. But I was really excited about the opportunity. I think that came across, and I would like to think that that's enough and that other people who are passionate about it will see that. One of the neat parts about FIRST is that you learn so much just by doing it. Nobody expects you to come into it knowing how to build a robot or write a grant but whether you want to be there. What inspired you to create the team in Frisco? As I mentioned, I was part of an FRC team at my previous high school in ninth grade, and it was a really cool experience. I felt like I learned a lot and it was such a supportive environment. I felt very grateful to all of the upperclassmen that I had there who taught me so much and welcomed me with open arms. I liked everything about FRC and how it worked. I liked making things, but also just having that community was really important to me. And so I happened to meet Sahil on my first day of school. He was just on the bus asking “Do you want to make a robotics team?” I feel like it's like serendipity but I met him and then it was just something that both of us were really excited about. We liked FRC specifically. I don't know how much of the history lesson you got, but Frisco ISD pushed back on FRC and wanted us to consider something smaller scale, like Vex or something like that. But we really wanted to do FRC in particular just because of how much you learn from that process and how excited we were to build a robot on that scale. I think for me, it was just me having that previous experience and that previous community and then wanting to have something like create something like that in Frisco, both for myself, and that that other people would get to experience as well. How did being part of the robotics team contribute to your personal and professional development in leadership and other skills? I think that doing FRC throughout high school shaped me. There are leadership, teamwork, and problem-solving skills to such an extent that I can't imagine or remember how I felt about my strength before FRC. Especially with everything that we had to do to make the Radicubs a community team. I feel like, I essentially had the experience of learning to start a business. We had to learn how nonprofits worked and signed all these things, or if we weren't old enough, other people signed them for us. I think it's hard to answer because it's like it's so big, right? I think I would honestly say that my experience with the Radicubs, really helped any professional skills that I had after the fact. Honestly, I don't think that I've developed much more since then. Everything that I know in terms of how to work on a team, how to deal with challenging situations, how to problem solve, like what fights are important to have, which ones like you just have to compromise. Everything I know is from robotics or I learned something about it from robotics. Do you have any lasting lessons that you had from being on the team? I do think I learned a lot about perseverance, I like to think that I'm like a determined person, I think it's natural sometimes when there are too many barriers or things are too hard to just give up and focus your attention on more productive or less upsetting things, It shaped me, the experience of going through something that was such a fight and we did have to persevere and then to have it work out. Also, I love it so much whenever I hear about what the Radicubs are up to nowadays or meet you guys. It's honestly so crazy to me that this thing that seemed so hanging by a thread unstable, like fighting for scraps at the beginning, still exists and is thriving. I also think that I learned a lot about working with other people, identifying what hills I'm going to die on, and what is maybe not so important. To be a good team member, you also have to recognize that. I think another important lesson is that we would have these disagreements, but the reason they seemed so intense or so high stakes was that we all wanted the same thing, which is what we thought was best for the team. What advice would you give to the current members on the team? There's something to finding a balance and being able to zoom out and see how robotics fits into the rest of your life. It’s a stepping stone, and you're not going to do robotics forever. What can you get out of the experience while you're there at the same time? I think it's really hard to explain to people outside of FIRST and FRC that like how consuming it is when you're in it, right? There were times, weeks during build season, my junior and senior year when it felt like I was basically working a full-time job and doing school. And the full-time job was just robotics. I recognize that doesn't make sense to people where they're like, what's the big deal? I think it's really important to care about things and I think that FRC does a really good job of creating a community of people who are passionate about something, and I hope that the current members of the public recognize how special that is to have that opportunity. You can zoom out and be like, it's a high school robotics competition and I'm going to write about it in my college apps. But also, I'm going to have a life after this, and then at the same time, it is kind of your life and that's okay. It's really special to care about something that much. One of the things that bugs me the most are people who say ”Nothing’s that big of a deal” I appreciate having things to care about and I hope other people keep that in mind, and that they recognize how special it is to be a part of a community team. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theradicubs/?hl=en Building a community with robotics allows for individuals with a passion for STEAM to learn more about how to contribute to the world of innovation in a new light. Participating in a community like FIRST, with all of its different programs, allows for people of all ages to learn more and look at the world through a lens made up of the FIRST Core Values. These values include discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork, and fun! These are what helps FIRST robotics teams to shine when they proceed on their journeys of learning about STEAM and how it can help us both in the present and in the future. This helps build a community which allows for individuals from different backgrounds to work and also learn together. The impact that FIRST has had on the world, inspiring many FIRST robotics teams to do their own outreach and share robotics to their community, improving other communities surrounding them as well. An example of this impact is our team, LAUNCH TEAM 6352, a community-based non-profit robotics team in Surprise, Arizona. We have been able to maintain a long lasting impact for robotics in Arizona starting from Surprise and spreading from there. We have been able to grow a presence of STEM in our city of Surprise and across the West Valley, which previously had very little engagement in STEM. We have focused our outreach to communities with limited access to STEM so that they can learn and spread it further from there. We have also begun a new chapter for our outreach by spreading STEM across the country and internationally! By helping spread STEM to communities in and out of our vicinity we can help create a lasting effect that can allow for new groups of people with a common interest in robotics to form across the world! With new communities emerging from the use of robotics it can be seen as a new step for the world to take in to achieve the common goal of solving problems like climate change on our planet. FIRST has also been able to change the mindset for the millions of students participating in their programs, providing the chance for them to share their ideas and solutions to solve the problems present in our world. By building communities around robotics or robotics around communities, it is possible to create a new way for people to look at the world and the impact that it can create is something that is substantial in that it can stay for years to come through the effect created from one single team spreading STEM to their community and those inspired by that impact can spread more from there, a never ending cycle. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/launchteam6352/ Website: https://sites.google.com/view/launchteamrobotics Hello, readers of FIRST Ladies!
Our directors from FRC team 3504 Girls of Steel wanted to share a FIRST Ladies event that we hosted at the FRC Greater Pittsburgh Regional. This event was very impactful, so we encourage you all to host similar events at regional competitions you attend in the future. On Thursday, February 29th during the competition’s scheduled lunch hour, Girls of Steel hosted a FIRST Ladies lunch discussion in a conference room at the David L. Lawrence Convention center. We were able to secure this official space by contacting the coordinators of the regional in advance. They also put our event on the official schedule, which definitely helped to increase attendance. In the weeks prior to the lunch discussion, we advertised the event via Chief Delphi and also by contacting local teams in Pittsburgh using the Steel City Robotics Alliance’s discord group. We also announced the event at a Week 0 competition that Girls of Steel hosted in Pittsburgh. Whenever we advertised the event, we emphasized that we were looking for “expert speakers”, who would be experienced women in STEM who would rotate between the tables at the lunch discussion. We chose rotating “experts” instead of one panel for everyone to keep every individual engaged in order to best spread the message of our event: the promotion of inclusion in FIRST! Around 60 students across 10+ teams attended our lunch discussion! Every table received a sheet of paper with guiding questions for their discussions (attached HERE if you would like to use it!) which helped break the ice. Overall, the discussion was very successful! Us directors had the opportunity to meet many students of different genders and backgrounds and share experiences as women in FRC. Every attendee was so kind and definitely embodied the FIRST Ladies mission. We plan to host annual events at the FRC regionals 3504 attends. We also hope to host an informal meet-up at the 2024 World Championship- stay tuned!! :) |
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