Mission

The world faces many serious challenges, and all of them require teams of technically competent, creative, and resilient people. Unfortunately, the training and education programs we use to train these people often minimize the potential for women to participate and lead. This happens for many reasons and in many ways, overtly and subtly. We train the girls and women in our program to not only work together as a team but to collaborate professionally with other teams, interact confidently with outside organizations, and provide leadership to the future generations of kids in robotics and STEM.

When FIRST commissioned Brandeis researchers to interview women participating in mixed-gender teams, many described being pushed to the outskirts — left with 'administrative, marketing, and organizational types of tasks' while the hands-on work stayed, in their word, 'gatekept' by the male members of the team. [^1]. Our observations are consistent: we've had members turned away from teams and from leadership roles just because they're girls. [1] Meschede, Haque, Zhang & Erickson Warfield (2024), https://heller.brandeis.edu/cyc/first/first-final-qual-fg-report.pdf

Why Women? Because women are underrepresented in STEM professions. They need not be, and that disparity starts in school. We believe that giving girls opportunities to compete, innovate, collaborate, and explore a real engineering project and all the roles in it, including leadership, gives them the opportunity to build the skills they need to be successful.

Starting with their first season, girls are given the opportunity and expectation to contribute to a subsystem on the robot. Whether it is drivetrain, mechanisms, or software, this pairing of empowerment and responsibility is the key feature of our program that gives girls the foundation to move onward. They grow into subsystem and team leadership roles, all of which are held by girls.

Why student-led? None of our teams has an adult coach. Every design decision is made by a student, every strategic and tactical path is chosen by a student. The girls run their season themselves, and they are better for it. While adult mentors are available when they have questions, the girls must live with their decisions, both good and bad. We believe this is the only way to join leadership with responsiblity, and it forges excellent leaders. In the words of our founding team: 'We don't build robots. We build women.'