By 2020, Robogals is aiming to reach 200,000 girls worldwide. To ideate new and innovative solutions to reach this target, Robogals invited various stakeholder groups, both internal and external to the organisation, to participate in the inaugural Robogals Design Thinking Day at One Roof Melbourne. The half day workshop saw over 30 volunteers, supporters and partners come together. Lead facilitator Samantha Hinds, Experimentation Lead in Innovation at AGL Energy, guided the workshop through several hands-on activities to identify areas for impact growth. Applying the same principles as service and user experience designers, workshop participants used creative problem-solving that focused on people and personalisation to offers more creative and human-centred solutions than traditional brainstorming methods. Workshop participants explored the need for Robogals to further differentiate itself as a STEM diversity leader and improve its brand presence through greater social awareness. This will be achieved through a continuous commitment to revitalising workshop content, maintaining market relevance by incorporating new technology, and better utilising an existing network of industry partners. A technological solution to develop a centralised, digital resource portal for workshop facilitators, volunteers and students to access for more effective workshop delivery, was also explored. Consistent with Robogals’ vision, participants also explored new ways to create longer lasting impact on the STEM industry, by opening up opportunities for collaboration with partner organisations to build brand awareness, continued support for students in further education, and further geographic expansion to increase global reach. It was also uncovered that unstructured and multi-channeled internal communications were impacting engagement with the organisation. Participants accordingly explored solutions to better connect with Robogals volunteers by increasing networking and socialising opportunities, developing a mentoring program and collaborating with volunteers more in decision-making processes. By utilising collaborative technologies, such as Slack, to open direct communications channels between all levels of the organisation, these solutions are now being rolled out to encourage more effective messaging between chapters and regions. Robogals looks forward to the next Design Thinking Day after this year’s inaugural success. Thank you to the generous workshop facilitators, Samantha Hinds, Caroline Patton and Dayle Stevens from AGL Energy for patiently guiding the workshop and introducing the participants to the LUMA Institute system of human-centric design thinking. Thank you as well to One Roof Melbourne, for the generous use of their female-centric coworking space.

Happy 10th Birthday, Robogals! Robogals hosted their 10th Anniversary Gala on July 14, bringing together current volunteers and alumni to celebrate Robogals’ achievements over the past decade and reflect  on the nights’ theme – Diversity, Development and Disruption.The event was generously hosted by the Melbourne and Monash chapters here in Melbourne where Robogals was founded in 2008. Our Asia Pacific Regional Executive Officer, Chelsea Edmonds and Global Chief Development Officer, Caitie McClelland opened the Gala night with a Welcome to Country before passing onto our Chief Executive Officer, Ami Pasricha, who welcomed attendees, presented our Robogals 2020 Strategy and recapped our recent key milestones. Robogals’ newly appointed Board Chair, Dayle Stevens (http://daylestevens.com) , led the night of guest speakers during entrees. Dayle recounted how she was first involved in Robogals. As Divisional CIO at AGL Energy, and a widely respected technology leader in disruption, Dayle revealed how spending time with Robogals volunteers continues to inspire her and help her reignite the spark to keep challenging the boundaries of her work. The first guest speaker of the night was Professor Karin Verspoor, Head of Computing Systems at the Melbourne School of Engineering. Karin has considered herself a woman in technology ever since she built her very first computer program at just nine years old! Karin identified ingrained sociocultural norms, a leaky education system, and strong stereotypes perpetrated by the media landscape as the three dominant issues in the battle to bring awareness to females in the STEM fields. Organisations like Robogals play a crucial part to disrupt this status quo by acting as a pipeline to get young girls into the field. The second guest speaker was Professor Elizabeth Croft, Dean of Engineering at Monash University, who took audience members journey through her life and career in STEM. She  highlighted the men and women who have empowered and supported her along the way to reflect on the importance of including both men and women in conversations surrounding STEM gender equality to achieve real and long-lasting change. Guests were then entertained by two Melbourne chapter volunteers, Karine Lim and Nathan Batham, who debuted Robogals’ first theme song! In their closing speech for the night, Robogals founder Marita Cheng joined co-founder Mark Parncutt remotely via Teleport, a telepresence robot for remote communication built by Marita’s start-up, Aubot (https://aubot.com/index.html ). Mark and Marita recounted meeting in their second year of university while running a robot design competition which sparked the idea for an organisation that would engage and inspire girls to a career in STEM…Robogals! Robogals would like to thank our generous supporters who made the evening possible: the Melbourne School of Engineering, Monash Engineering Faculty, the Melbourne Robogals chapter and the Monash Robogals chapter. May the next ten years be just as successful as the first ten have been at Robogals!

On the 14th of July, Robogals will be celebrating its 10th birthday! To mark this milestone, we’re excited to announce the Around the World Tour: an international series of workshops specially designed around the theme of “a global community” and run by local Robogals chapters worldwide. These workshops will embody the Robogals’ vision, “A global culture of inclusion and diversity in engineering”. The tour will kick off in the Asia Pacific region, before moving through to North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These workshops will highlight Robogals’ global impact over the past 10 years, celebrating how much we’ve achieved and continue to achieve in the world of STEM. To date, Robogals has run thousands of workshops and introduced over 70,000 girls to the world of science and engineering – numbers that we hope to see continue to grow in the next ten years and beyond! This is where you come in – over the next few months our chapters will work with their local communities to begin crafting their workshops. If you’re interested in getting involved, please contact your local chapter. If you’re not sure what the closest chapter to you is, or who to contact, please visit the Locations page on our website to find out! The Around the World Tour workshops will include engineering activities and challenges with a global focus, along with the opportunity to learn about famous women in STEM from all over the world. We want to recognise each of our 30 Robogals chapters (located in over 10 different countries) and how STEM has developed in their own countries as well as across the globe. The tour will run for approximately two months in each region, across the following dates: Asia Pacific region– 14th July to 30th September Europe, Middle East and Africa region– 1st October to 30th November North America region– 1st October to 30th November The Around the World Tour workshops will be unique to every chapter and shaped by the input of their local community – everything from holiday workshops, to school workshops to rural and regional trips, all engineered as a demonstration of the Robogals’ key pillars of integrity, community, passion and innovation. Also make sure you check out our latest news and the official Robogals Facebook page for more updates on the Around the World Tour as we get closer to the launch on July 14th!

On 27th March 2018, the Robogals Monash chapter held their annual Industry Gala night,  a way to thank volunteers for their hard work and dedication throughout the year by providing them with an opportunity to connect with Robogals’ sponsors and network with representatives from various STEM sectors. The night was also a chance for our volunteers to listen to three women in STEM share their experience building their careers, promoting gender diversity within their companies and the positive impact they have witnessed organisations like Robogals have on the wider STEM community. Our first guest speaker was Lina Chan, Developer at ANZ, who shared how she discovered what she was truly passionate about by deviating from the traditional pathways of achieving success set out for her, and instead forged her own path. Her experience has taught her the importance of being open-minded to new opportunities, in order to better connect with yourself and your purpose in life, and learn a different perspective. Our volunteers then heard from Professor Jean Armstrong of Monash University’s Faculty of Engineering, who described the life of a female STEM academic. She revealed an honest and awe-inspiring depiction of her struggles and triumphs as a female within this field, where she specialises in Digital Telecommunications. Professor Armstrong shared her opinions on the three best and worst aspects about being an academic, and shared her top career tips for students considering an academic career. In particular, she emphasised the importance of learning how to prioritise, learning how to say no, and the advantages of establishing a mentor early on while career-building. Our last guest speaker of the evening was Emma Love, Implementation Manager at Ericsson, who treasures a personal connection with Robogals, having been the Co-President of Robogals Perth during 2014 to 2015. Emma discussed the benefits of putting yourself out there and giving new challenges a try, especially if it pushes you to discover unfamiliar territory. She revealed that the best moments of her career so far always occurred when she actively pushed her boundaries and discovered something new about herself. Following the presentations, our volunteers had the opportunity to network with representatives from a range of organisations including Advisian, ANZ, Bosch, Deloitte, Ericsson, Jacobs and Real Time Leaning (RTL), as well as several members of the Engineering Faculty of Monash University. We were also honoured to have Robogals CEO Ami Pasricha, as well as several members of the Robogals Global Committee and the Board attend the Industry Gala night. The Robogals Monash chapter would like to thank both the Monash Executive Committee, as well as the newly formed Monash Support Team members, for their hard work and dedication, working together to plan and deliver such a successful event.  

On 16th March, Robogals EMEA attended The Big Bang Fair in Birmingham NEC – the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) for young people in the UK. The three day fair is jam-packed with interactive workshops, exhibitions, theatre shows, and careers information sessions featuring STEM professionals, to inspire and engage hundreds of thousands of young visitors annually. This award-winning fair aims to show young people (primarily aged 7-19) the exciting and rewarding opportunities that exist for them in the STEM field, by bringing education out of the classroom and into everyday lives. The culminating event to mark the end of British Science Week, this year the fair brought particular focus to the different areas within engineering in celebration of the UK Government’s recent endorsement of the Year of Engineering, a brand-new campaign by not-for-profit organisation, EngineeringUK, to inspire a whole generation of young people. EngineeringUK estimates that at least 186,000 new engineers will be needed each year until 2024 to fill the UK’s current skills shortage, and work on a wealth of new projects to help tackle society’s greatest challenges. Robogals volunteers from the Manchester, LSBU and Bristol chapters ran incredibly popular robotics workshops over the weekend, attracting hundreds of students by deploying a playful, busking robot to engage members of the crowd in a friendly game of ‘pass-the-robot’.   The team brought along an Arduino smart car which demonstrated to the entranced crowd how robotic hardware and software interacts to problem-solve the command issued. The computer remote-controlled car, built by EMEA regional mentor, Gabriela Gallegos, was a huge success with the crowd eagerly sharing their experience on social media. Our team also brought along several LEGO MINDSTORM EV3s robots that proved immensely popular with students, and Robogals workshops were booked out before midday. Students were grouped into teams of 15 by our volunteers and challenged to use the EV3 robots to complete the Line-Follower Challenge. The challenge is simple; teams must program a robot with color sensors, like the EV3s, to follow a black line. However, programming a robot to do what appears to them to be a simple task, usually proves more fiddly than they expected, and it becomes a fascinating challenge for students. Learning both the logic and skills behind programming robots for this challenge helps the students improve their understanding of how robots “think”, and hopefully increases their appreciation for the complexity involved in programming LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3 robots. Teams are encouraged to test different approaches to solving the problem and ultimately discover what the working programming solution is. Robogals volunteers were on hand throughout the workshops to supervise teams and guide them through the challenge, assisting students to identify and troubleshoot the problems they encountered. Through patient guidance, the vast majority of teams were successful and received certificates for their achievement to hopefully remind them of the time they partook in a Robogals robotics challenge. Overall, the Big Bang Fair was a resounding success for Robogals, with our volunteers guiding more than 50 girls and 100 boys through the Line-Follower challenge, engaging countless attendees with busking and showcasing the Arduino Smart Car. Our volunteers were also approached by several visiting teachers interested in visiting the university-based chapters with their students and finding partnership organisations to assist in running an after-school robotics club at local secondary schools.    To find out more about EngineeringUK’s Year of Engineering 2018 campaign, follow this link: https://www.yearofengineering.gov.uk/

Earlier this month, our EMEA region ran Robogals’ first 2018 S INE conference at the University of Aberdeen. When we asked the regional team what stood out at EMEA SINE, they all agreed it was the palpable sense of community, interest shown by volunteers, level of engagement and the desire to share ideas.   SINE (Seminar Inductive New Executives) is a conference hosted annually by each of Robogals’ three regions: Asia Pacific, North America and Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA). SINE is an exciting time for Robogals as volunteers from across a region come together to learn more about the broader Robogals community through workshops, presentations and panel events. A key SINE objective is to share ideas on how to run better workshops and develop soft skills in areas such as event management, teamwork, sustainability and networking. At SINE, our EMEA volunteers were able to take part in learning workshops such as Role Specific Training, Succession Planning and Handover, Networking Skills, Commercial Collaboration and Partnerships, Volunteer Engagement and Introduction to Public Speaking. These workshops are particularly pertinent as SINE coincides with the induction of new chapter executives, This year’s EMEA conference focused on ‘innovation’ and the conference agenda was curated to include initiatives such as the “Cool Ideas Showcase”, “Workshop Challenge” and “Workshop Ideas, Stories and Experiences”. These initiatives encouraged chapters to share their experiences over the last year and learn from each other. There were also plenty of opportunities to ask questions and give feedback to the regional team during our Industry/Graduates Panel and Outgoing Panel. These events equipped volunteers with insights that allowed them to better plan for the year ahead and improve in areas that would most benefit our chapters. 2017 was clear a year of growth for EMEA as the regional team expanded from two to eight members. Furthermore, EMEA welcomed the launch of two new chapters at the University of St. Andrews and London South Bank University. EMEA SINE was also a fantastic time for our EMEA volunteers to celebrate their 2017 achievements and reward volunteers for their hard work. The following awards were presented to selected EMEA chapters during the annual EMEA awards ceremony: The “Innovation Award” – given to our Sussex chapter for what they have achieved this year in terms of chapter growth, sustainability and embracing new ideas The “Up Award” – given to our new London South Bank University chapter with an honorary mention for our Loughborough chapter for their progress made throughout the year, as well as for their sense of community and teamwork The “‘They did that? Wow!’ Award” – given to our London Imperial chapter with an honorary mention for the Aberdeen chapter, for the events/projects they have run during this past year, as well as for their high levels of volunteers’ engagement EMEA awarded their “Legends of Robogals” award to Elena Lazarova (previously from the Manchester chapter/currently Regional Mentor). Alice Porter (from our Manchester chapter) received an honorary mention. March will be a busy month for EMEA with International Women’s Day coming up on the 8th of March as well as Big Bang Fair on 16th and 17th March. EMEA is also planning a new Science Challenge across the region, which will most likely run in 2019, as well as various workshops and activities throughout the year.

    This past semester marked a significant milestone for Robogals North America; the Queen’s Chapter ran our first workshop with a school located in a rural community. The inclusion of rural communities in educational programs like Robogals is essential. These programs provide students with opportunities to learn about STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and explore careers they may have otherwise overlooked. Many girls, especially in more remote communities, may have less exposure to enrichment programs, especially science-based workshops. In a town such as Kingston, schools within the city are able to participate in many programs run through the university; but the farther removed from the city, the less opportunities there are for such activities. Robogals is working hard to combat this problem by actively reaching out to under-served groups in our broader community. By reaching out to these students at a young age Robogals is able to dispose the stereotypes of a “typical” engineering student, and serves as a role model for young girls. To start off our rural workshop series we sent a team of volunteers to the school — about an hour outside of the city — to run activities with the students during science class. This workshop gave the students an introduction to robotics, and got them excited to sign up for the field trip to Queen’s campus the next week. Being able to provide transportation to and from campus made the trip much more accessible for many families – and the following Friday we sent a bus to the school to pick up eighteen students, and two parent chaperones who has signed up for the field trip. When the students arrived at Queen’s our wonderful volunteers led them in team-building STEM challenges, such as “the Marshmallow Challenge”. One of the most exciting aspects of the trip was taking the students on a tour of Queen’s campus. This allowed the girls to see first-hand what it is like to study engineering, and provided them with inspiration for their own post-secondary school goals. After a catered lunch, the afternoon consisted of extended robotics workshops that built on their knowledge from the morning workshop. Our first rural workshop was a huge success. Moving forward, the Queen’s Chapter will strive to reach more under-served groups, especially remote secondary schools. Being able to host the workshop on campus limited our cost of running the workshop down to just providing a bus for the students. It is free for university clubs to book rooms on campus, and by partnering with local businesses we are often able to cater lunch for the students free of charge. The feedback from the teachers, parents, and students involved in the workshops was overwhelmingly positive. The students were excited to use new technology and learn new things. As volunteers, we were grateful to be able to provide the students with an experience that they might otherwise miss out on.

At Robogals, we work to inspire, engage and empower. In that spirit, our Perth chapter held a high tea late last year in collaboration with BP, one of the world’s leading integrated oil and gas companies and silver sponsor of the chapter. This event was motivated by Robogals’ and BP’s shared vision of ensuring a better gender balance across the workforce. The aim? Connecting our university-attending volunteers with industry representatives. This kind of Robogals event is always well received by both parties and this event was no exception. The annual high tea saw more participation in 2017 than ever before! The opportunity provided Robogals volunteers with access to representatives from over nine companies and in return, the companies with passionate, motivated young men and women, invested in a vision of global change. This knowledge exchange is a key part of Robogals’ commitment to developing our volunteers into culturally aware industry leaders. ‘I think the high tea was a huge success and gave us access to key insights about future employment and the opportunity to discuss current issues within our difference industries’ – Rae Tang, Robogals Perth Marketing Manager. Our volunteers said the highlights of the evening were the delicious food, high attendance and the keynote speaker, Susie Pezzoni from BP. Ms Pezzoni’s speech highlighted the influence other women in the industry had on her and sparked conversations around inspiring women and gender diversity. We are very proud of the impact we can have not only on school-aged girls across the world through our education workshops, but also the value Robogals can bring to students studying at university. We are proud of the professional development opportunities we can provide and of the strong multi-disciplinary, gender diverse communities we build within universities to support young women through their higher education.

  On Friday October 6th, Robogals teamed up with Engineers Australia to run the 2017 Science and Engineering Day (SED). The event was open to girls across Melbourne, and this year, it was held in conjunction with a celebration of the conclusion of the Robogals Science Challenge. The Robogals Science Challenge is an Australia-wide science competition for young girls. Through the competition, participants learn about science and engineering while working on fun projects on a variety of topics.