FIRST Technology Challenge

Heat It Up and Keep It Cool: Teambuilding and Transitioning by Teresa Smalley Our team, Heat it Up and Keep it Cool Robotics , and its five members, have just ended our fourth year . We have graduated FIRST Lego League and are now FIRST Tech Challenge Team 8496 starting our rookie year! We have also added a sixth team member.  During the past four years we have spent an average of 15 to 20 hours per week together. For the past three three years we have been an Ambassador Team for the Los Angeles Region . This year we were one of two teams to win the Los Angeles Regional Championships, but no promotions were made to the World Festival from Southern California. We instead were invited to attend the International Open in Toronto , Canada. What an honor and an unbelievably great experience. In addition, we do outreach activities including mentoring two FLL teams and robotics demos at local monthly events.  Our program runs year round, we meet during the school year and dur...

Texas is the home of The Alamo, delicious BBQ, and the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas.” It is one of the largest states in the continental US and encompasses some of the most diverse terrains in the country, ranging from deserts, swamps, to coastlines. It also happens to be the home of FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Team 7785, The Pink Lady Hornets , a team who had the honor of advancing to the FTC South Super Regional for the 2013-2014 season. These ladies hail from Flour Bluff High School in Corpus Christi and alongside them, have a program at their school that includes 4 additional rookie teams, 2 of which are all girls’ teams. Team 7785, an all girls’ team of juniors and seniors, states that their mission is "To not only spread the idea of robotics, but to change the future of robotics by encouraging young girls to dream of being in the STEM fields and to chase these dreams regardless of societal stereotypes." This past season, The Pink Lady Hornets held their first “No Rob...

If you've ever attended an FTC event, you’ll no doubt agree that it is predominantly a male activity. For reasons that are too nebulous to catalog and more than a bit fraught to “explain,” boys flock to engineering and robots and all things remotely controlled. That’s not to say that girls don’t flock to it, but the tendency of many, I’d venture to say, is to hang back when faced with the sheer intensity of the boys’ confidence, enthusiasm, and perhaps even obsession. The girls may have just as strong an interest, but they approach it all more obliquely and cautiously. The outcome is often that, in a coed environment, you have a team that is primarily boys with maybe one or two girls, and those girls are the ones who are the most experienced, confident, or simply impervious to intimidation. I’d even go so far as to guess that those girls are there because they were inspired by a male relative, like a brother who was way into LEGO building, or an engineer father. While there’s n...