College of Engineering conducts girls-only robotics summer camp

Women prepare to enter robotics field

By: Rachel Mehlhaff

Posted: 11/27/07

A new grant will allow high school girls to build and program robots during a summer camp at high schools in the area.
The College of Engineering received a $30,000, one-year "Innovation Generation" grant from the Motorola Foundation to conduct summer camps for high school girls.
The goal of these camps is to reach girls and show them computer science and engineering are something they can do," said David Keathly of the computer science and engineering faculty. "These are fields that women are highly underrepresented in."
The college has conducted these camps since the summer of 2005 at the NT Denton and Dallas campuses. With this new grant, it will be able to take the camps directly to the girls. "Mobile Robotic Summer Camp" will begin in the summer of 2008.
"That we will actually take out to the community," Keathly said. Students without transportation have a hard time making it to the camps, said Robert Akl of the computer science and engineering faculty. He said by bringing the camps to the high schools, it will be easier for the girls to come.
"We can administer the camps there as opposed to having the students come here," he said.
The camps, as of the summer of 2007, include Robocamp, Advanced Robocamp, CSExperience Programming Camp and Eng-inuity! Engineering Design Camp.
The camps are one week long and run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Twenty girls attend each camp. NT went from having two camps to now having seven camps.
"It is an area women are very capable in," Keathly said.
At the camps, girls put together robots and program them to respond to sound and light. They even make them dance. Akl said at one of the camps a couple of the girls programmed their robot to do the two-step. The girls and the robot danced in sync with the music, he said.
"We wanted to mainly target women and minorities to get them excited about engineering," Akl said. "Women are 51 percent of the population, but that number is so much less in engineering."
He said they made it an all-girl camp so there is no gender bias and everyone is on an equal footing to give the girls more confidence.
"We wanted them to feel safe and creative," Akl said.
Mitra Mahdavian, NT alumnus, who worked at these camps for the past three years, said the girls surprised her.
"When the girls started they were apprehensive about being there," she said. "They didn't think they could do it."
By the end of the camp she said they were a lot more confident. There was also a change in their attitude toward the subjects of engineering, computer science and math.
"It was pretty amazing, they learned faster than we could teach them," Mahdavian said.
"It helps them build confidence, which is always a great thing."
The original idea for these camps came while judging a Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology robotics competition, where area middle schools and high schools compete. Keathly said that while talking with students, he and Akl realized there was a need for computer science and engineering camps just for girls.
Akl said the girls at the competition had to fight harder than the boys to get their designs incorporated into the designing and building of the robot.
There is no cost to participants. The grant is used to cover the different costs of the camps. It covers replacement parts for the robots, lunches and snacks, student salaries, transportation and time the professors are at the camp, T-shirts and miscellaneous items such as pens and pencils, Keathly said.
Through these camps, Keathly said girls are also taught that college is an option and financial aid is available.
Keathly and Akl have guest speakers from different fields of engineering come to the camps. This is so the girls can have female role models from the industry, Akl said.