Between coding, engineering and building robots, this all-girls robotics team does it all
"Get in loser, we’re building robots."
This all-girls robotics team from Alabama is inspiring confidence in young women involved in STEM, one bright pink robot at a time.
It started when Emily King joined a robotics team. It turns out, it was mostly made up of boys. To her dismay, they would tell the girls to sit and make posters instead of engineering the robots. But Emily wasn’t having it.
“I wanted to build the robot if I was going to be there,” said Emily. “After that season was over, I went and talked to my Girl Scout coach and she was like ‘Oh that sounds like a great idea.’ So we came up with an all-girls robotics team so that all the girls can be doing all the work instead of the boys.”
Thus, The Nerdettes was born. A very determined, very intelligent, and very pink group of young women on a mission to make a more supportive environment in robotics.
“Women don't judge you for being women. They're not going to look at you and be like, ‘You can't do this cause you're a girl.’ No, we all know that we're capable and we all know that we can do these things,” explained Emily.
They recruited girls of all ages, from 7th grade to senior year of high school. Building, coding, and traveling together eventually built friendships as strong as their robots. To ensure the legacy lives on after the older girls graduate, they even started mentoring a younger group called the Gear Girls.
Watch this all-girls robotics team inspire support for young women going into STEM.
“It has been an amazing transformation to see how confident they have grown in their public speaking skills and being able to talk about what they do and what their robot's able to do and how they got their design there,” states their coach Erick Hollsonback.
The Nerdettes have won awards and recognition and made it to the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship. Despite feeling that they are not always taken seriously at the competitions, they constantly prove the doubters wrong, even inspiring other all-girls teams to rise.
“We want people to see that it can be fun and we want girls to see that it can be fun. We want them to branch out into the STEM field and see how this is a stepping block into that career,” said Megan Quinn, a member of the Nerdettes.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: All-girls robotic team is building the future, now
