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“Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls. But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls. The girls who played with them could only ever play at being mothers.” When you go into the toy aisle at a store the options are staggeringly different between the toys for boys and girls. Boys are offered toy cars, construction sets, and miniature spaceships, while girls are often offered dolls that act as babies. While boys are told that they can be whatever they want to be, girls are told from a young age that their only goal in life should be to become a mother. This conditions women from an impressionable age to not strive for bigger career opportunities and this often causes women to be forced into domestic roles later on in life. “All of these women are Barbie, and Barbie is all of these women. She might have started out as just a lady in a bathing suit, but she became so much more. She has her own money, her own house, her own car, her own career.” When we stop women from participating in different careers, half of the population's ideas go completely unnoticed. Women have provided some of the most influential findings in history from Rosalind Franklin discovering the structure of DNA to Ada Lovelace who started the field of programming. Without these women we wouldn’t know many of the things we do today. These women and many others show that their ideas and contributions are needed and women deserve the same opportunities as men. Although women have begun to strive more within STEM fields and higher education, they still aren’t given the same treatment as men and only make up 27% of the STEM workforce. Instead of only pushing boys to pursue their dreams and follow their passions, we should give young girls and boys equal opportunities to be whatever they want to be. In order to give young women a chance to pursue their dreams, we have to stop color coding items and providing baby dolls. Instead, we need to give women the chance to explore different career paths from a young age and we shouldn’t force them into roles that are made “for women.” “Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything.” Works Cited: “Women in STEM Statistics: Progress and Challenges”, stemwomen.com, 2023 - Quotes from Barbie movie (2023) Team LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/cybervipers8717 Instagram: www.instagram.com/frc_8717_cybervipers/ Team Website: sites.google.com/view/cyber-vipers/home?authuser=0 Submitted by Cyber Vipers, FRC Team 8717 
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 The first great American woman in the history of electrical engineering, Edith Clarke, made several great contributions to the area of power engineering. Born on February 10, 1883, in Ellicott City, Maryland, she was the daughter of one of nine children from a farming family. At the age of 12 years, Clarke lost both parents and thus grew up under the guardianship of an older sister. At the age of 18 years, she inherited a modest amount of money and was admitted to Vassar College, from which in 1908 she graduated with honors in mathematics and astronomy. After teaching mathematics and physics in private schools, Clarke became a “computer” at AT&T in 1912, which included doing complicated mathematical calculations. She later did some evening studies in electrical engineering at Columbia University. In 1918 she entered MIT and in 1919 earned her Master of Science degree in electrical engineering, the first woman to receive such from the institution. While at General Electric (GE), Clarke achieved many firsts. She took a brief leave from GE in 1921, becoming a physics teacher at the Constantinople Women's College in Turkey. In 1922, she returned to GE, and was the first American woman to hold a professional appointment as an electrical engineer. Clarke performed many analyses of electrical power systems. She also developed a graphical device called the "Clarke calculator," intended to simplify complex calculations for electrical engineers. In 1926 she became the first female speaker at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Her talk that day was power transmission system stability - an area of growing interest today as systems are extending in length and complexity. When Clarke started teaching electrical engineering at the University of Texas in Austin back in 1947, she became the first female electrical engineering professor in the United States. Until her retirement in 1956, she taught a whole generation of engineers with her extensive experience and vast knowledge that proved highly beneficial. In the course of her work, Clarke received many honors and awards. She was also the first woman to become a professional member of Tau Beta Pi, which is the oldest engineering honor society in the United States. Clarke became the first woman to be inducted as a Fellow of AIEE in the year 1948. She also received the 1954 Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award for making so many original contributions that form a basis for both the theory of stability and the analysis of electrical circuits. In 2015, she was inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her work on inventions related to electrical engineering. However, Clarke's legacy is not only about the technical contribution but also about breaching the gender barriers for future generations of women who could aspire to enter this highly male-dominated engineering field. Her work on developing methods for safe and efficient distribution of electrical power holds considerable implications today for industrial practice and delineates one of the fundamental ways that women have succeeded in pushing forward the domains of engineering and technology. Submitted by Alicia M., Senior Captain FRC Team 7503 Radicubs Frisco, TX radicubs.com | @theradicubs Works Cited: “Edith Clarke.” Maryland State Archives. https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/educ/exhib its/womenshallfame/html/clarke.html “Edith Clarke.” EngineerGirl. https://www.engineergirl.org/125222/Edith-Clarke “Edith Clarke.” Edison Tech Center. https://edisontechcenter.org/Clarke.html “Edith Clarke.” USPTO. https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/edith-clarke “Edith Clarke: Architect of Modern Power Distribution.” IEEE Spectrum.https://spectrum.i eee.org/edith-clarke-modern-power-distribution “Edith Clarke.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Clarke  What is outreach: Outreach is a team’s way of establishing their values for FIRST® and STEM throughout the community. This can involve activities like networking with professionals, visiting robotics labs nearby, coaching and mentoring other FIRST teams, volunteering and STEM-related activities and so much more. Why is outreach important? Outreach is important because it allows for your team to demonstrate how it made an impact on the STEM community, and spread FIRST values. A few FTC awards such as Connect, Motivate, and Inspire (the highest-ranked award) are all based on a team’s outreach. Outreach usually takes up 2-3 pages of the Engineering portfolio, which is usually 16 pages. Judges are looking for a diverse set of outreach events that have been done throughout the year, and demonstrate a clear impact and gracious professionalism. If your FTC team isn’t sure how to establish good outreach, here are some tips and tricks for where to find opportunities. How to establish outreach: 1. Cold email professionals and ask to be mentored
How to talk about outreach in the engineering portfolio: Outreach should be described in a specific way in the portfolio to be deemed impactful. A few strategies some teams have used:
- Allison A., Green Gang, FTC Team 24158 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greengangftc/  Hi FIRST Ladies! We are FTC Team 14917 Asteria, based out of Marlborough School for Girls in Los Angeles, California. As we came together for the first time collectively this year, we’ve forged a shared identity, fusing together elements from our prior teams to propel us to success. So far this season, all of our team members have applied advanced Onshape skills to our collaborative robot CAD, utilized our expertise of shop tools like the ShopBot CNC to fabricate custom parts, and consistently iterated our subsystems, refining the construction of our physical robot. Within our community, we’ve hosted after school workshops with local schools, connected with STEM professionals around the world, and highlighted under-appreciated members of the FTC community, our volunteers, through an interview series.
However, none of this would be possible without our unique team structure which allows us to effectively collaborate, communicate, and execute our goals. As opposed to a sole captain, a popular choice amongst FTC teams, we have a leadership team. Composed of both a Team Captain and several Division Heads, each leader has a specific role or task to oversee, such as fabrication or social media. Our leadership team meets weekly, discussing and collaborating about the more niche aspects of Asteria. In addition, all twelve of our team members identify as women and gender minorities, creating a tight-knit community of inclusion and mutual respect. With this, we hope to serve as an example for FIRST teams across the globe, showing that gender identity and success are not mutually exclusive. Thank you so much for taking the time to learn more about our team, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Email: [email protected] Instagram: @team14917 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!  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 |
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