Wonderbots: Making Way for Girls in STEM

Since 2021, Team 1072 has been organizing “Wonderbots”, a program to empower girls in STEM. The 7-week course, open to all middle school girls in the Bay Area, covers a variety of programming topics students are able to put into practice through SpikePrime robots. After the program ends, they take the skills they learn and the passions they discover and apply them to future projects - the curriculum is meant to pave the way for real-world application. Wonderbots opens the gates of STEM and robotics and serves as a space for girls to exercise their creativity to follow their own direction. 

With Wonderbots, our goal was to create a space where girls’ voices could be heard and their ideas could be both recognized and utilized in competition. In a space where women are often overlooked, allowing younger students to gain the confidence and knowledge, as well as the ability to adapt and experiment, is of the utmost importance. In our co-ed robotics programs such as FLL, we noticed that there were significantly fewer girls who signed up, and even fewer who ended up staying. We talked to some of the girls who left, and many expressed that they felt stifled by the large majority of boys; and the girls were frequently talked over by and dismissed by the boys. We already started seeing the impacts in our FLL classes, where some of the girls withdrew from discussions after being discouraged from participating earlier in the program. For every four boys, there was just one girl, and the ratio only became more extreme as more girls left. Hence, we felt motivated to create a safe space to innovate and explore, where every girl could feel like they belonged.

I had the privilege of witnessing the continued journey of a girl that I taught in FLL when she joined Wonderbots the next year. In FLL,  she appeared reserved and generally went along with her group mates’ ideas. Though she never had any problems with her group members, she seemed to struggle with speaking up. When I began mentoring Wonderbots, I got the opportunity to teach her again. As the program went on, she really broke out of her shell and blossomed into a confident and outspoken young girl. Not only did she lead her team in the programming process, she seemed more passionate and invested in coding, often staying a couple minutes after class to share the progress of her team and propose future plans.