Twenty-three kids built a robot on Saturday afternoon, and every one of them drove it when she was finished.
We spent noon to four at Swanson Park in Omaha, at the Swanson Sampler Time Trial, a youth mountain bike race run by the Nebraska Interscholastic Cycling League. The riders were student-athletes in grades five through twelve.
Our table was not off in a corner of the venue. We set up inside the GRiT tent, and that is the part worth explaining.
Why the GRiT tent
GRiT stands for Girls Riding Together. It is NICA's push to bring more girls into mountain biking, a sport that has been overwhelmingly male for most of its history. At a race, the GRiT tent is the welcoming committee. It is a spot in the pit zone where girls can sit between runs, make something, meet a female coach, and shake off race nerves before they line up.
Competitive robotics has the same problem cycling has, and we are working on it from the same direction. Put women where they can be seen. Make the first try cost nothing. Build somewhere to belong before you build somewhere to compete.
So setting up inside GRiT was not a stretch. It was two programs working the same problem, in the same tent, on the same afternoon.
What they built
Each kid built a VEX speed build. A real robot, small enough to finish in one sitting, and it drives.
That last part carries more weight than it sounds like. She is not handed a finished robot to try out. She puts it together herself, then picks up a controller and it moves because of what she just did.
Anyone who races understands that trade immediately. You work on the machine, then you ride the machine. The payoff is yours because the work was.
The timing mattered as much as the activity. A race weekend is mostly waiting. Girls came off the course, drifted into the tent, and had a stretch of nothing before their next run. Twenty minutes fits that gap almost exactly. Nobody had to choose between building a robot and racing her bike, and the table stayed busy all afternoon because of it.
Next to it sat the kind of robot our teams build across a competition season. Twenty minutes gets you something that drives. A season gets you that. Nobody had to make the speech. The two robots sitting near each other made the argument on their own.
We brought Bella, too
Bella is our therapy dog, and she spent the afternoon being extremely good at her job.
That is not a side note. The GRiT tent exists to bring a rider's heart rate down between runs, and a girl who is not ready to build anything can still come sit with a dog. Lowering the stakes on the first step is most of the work. GRiT knows this, which is why the tent is a hangout and not a booth. We brought a version of the same idea on four legs.
The siblings found us too. A race weekend means families sitting around for hours between heats, and the younger brothers and sisters had nothing to do until there was something to build.
What we did not expect
Several of the girls already had robot stories.
Two of them told us about it. One had built in a class. The other had been in a club. Both spoke about it in the past tense.
Sit with that for a second. These girls were not short on exposure to robotics. They were not short on competitive drive either, having given up a Saturday to be timed on a bike course. Neither piece was missing.
What ran out was the structure.
A classroom unit ends when the unit ends. A club ends when the sponsor moves on, or the grade changes, or the school stops offering it. Both are good things. Neither is a pathway. Nothing about either one is built to still be there in three years.
The thing NICA already solved
This is the exact problem NICA answered for cycling. A composite team means a girl does not need her own school to field a program. She can ride anyway. That is the only reason there was a tent full of girls at Swanson Park at all.
Robotics needs the same answer, and that is the work we do. Community teams, so a girl who built something once in a fifth grade classroom has somewhere to go in eighth grade, and again in eleventh.
Every girl in that tent had already proven she will show up for something hard on a weekend. Two of them had already built a robot. Nobody needed to be sold on any of it.
The only thing missing was somewhere for it to keep going.
Thinking about robotics for your student? gainingSTEAM runs community VEX IQ and VEX V5 teams across the Omaha metro, open to students from any school. Tell us about your student and we will help you find a fit.
Running a youth event? If you have families waiting around between heats, we can bring the tent, the robots, and the dog. Here is what we bring.