The blogging has been put off for a while now due to the craziness involved in building a robot and organizing a hackathon.
The short version: I spent over 95 hours over the course of six weeks working with the robotics team to complete a robot from start to finish for the upcoming FIRST robotics competition. Concurrently, I had been collaborating alongside three other girls from different high schools to pull together a hackathon called FemHacks. It was a success!
The slightly longer version:
Build season: Going into the build season, our team felt apprehensive. Was it a fluke that we made playoffs at CalGames? Can we really build a decent robot? I think that we are often afflicted with the mentality that because we have less funding, because we have less mentors, because we are not a powerhouse robotics team, that there is no way we can build a decent robot. And to some extent, the fact that we are a team with less can affect our outcome. Our team captain kept us together. We made a plan, argued over whether or not to follow it, and started to build. I was running the electronics department for the first time, and I worried that I was talking to much or demonstrating too little. But through trial and error and countless Monday meetings, build season was getting things done. Thanks to parent volunteers and dedicated members, we stayed late almost everyday after school, testing autonomous, wiring efficiently, and troubleshooting the mechanisms. Miraculously, we were actually on track to finishing in time to test at a practice field, which provided valuable information on how to improve the climbing system. And now, after skipping meals, befriending other robotics teams, and literally invading the Maker Space with all our tools, we await the competition in late March. Wish us luck!
Femhacks: As for FemHacks, planning started around October or so, thanks to Stanford’s Girls Teacher Girls To Code liaison program. I was grouped with three other high school girls from the Bay Area to organize a hackathon, and it was a lot more self-directed than I expected. We had to contact companies to sponsor us, find a venue (mulesoft in sf), gather the attendees, and ask for workshops to be run. I must have wrote more emails during those months than the entire year before. I found that running an event such as FemHacks relied the most on communication between teammates and support staff. It was pretty amazing how four high schoolers pulled off the event for more than fifty girls and twenty adult mentors, and I am quite proud of everyone. The projects that were created during the hacking included carbon footprint calculators and interactive trading cards, and I could not be any happier with the results. Extra swag left over from FemHacks (t-shirts and stickers!) are an added plus as well. Stay tuned for a possible FemHacks 2.0 next year, and and Hour of Code coming sooner than that.
