[Year 12 IT Apps] Wanted! Female students to join the 2016 RoboCats Team!

[Therese Keane]

Greetings!

We’re about to accelerate our recruitment campaign in preparation for the 2016 build season and are looking for secondary school girls who would like to be part of the RoboCats Team. This year we successfully fielded an all girls' Victoria Team for the FIRST Robotics Challenge and the RoboCats were  received the the Judges’ Award at the inaugural 2015 Australian FIRST Robotics Regional Tournament in Sydney. We would like to follow up our success, and encourage more girls to be in involved with this Team. If you know of any female students in your classes or school that you think may be interested, could you please pass this information on?


For further information see http://www.melbournerobocats.org



Background

The FRC is a varsity sport for the mind, combining a unique sporting challenge with the rigours of science and technology. Teams have limited time (i.e. six weeks) and money to build a 40-50 kg robot using industry hardware and software to compete in the challenge. The emphasis is on fun and challenging oneself; it’s not about awards. The benefits to  students have been profound, with students previously not contemplating engineering now including it as their top choices. It is not only for students considering engineering. In the past students from Arts and Business Management has helped out, as each team functions as a miniature business unit. Furthermore, skills such as problem solving, communication and team work are readily portable to any discipline, not just engineering. So the students do learn many valuable skills, irrespective of their eventual studies.

The FRC is open to students between 14-18 years of age. ( http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc)
I have attached a YouTube video to provide a bit more of an insight into what the FRC is all about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vQgZCvNKNE

Melbourne RoboCats

We would like to field a team of about 10 girls and cap it at 20. This team will be mentored by some of the world's best engineers from the likes of BAE Systems, and will include a number of their female engineers. Milorad Cerovac (King David School)  is more than happy to  chat to any interested school to explain the FRC in more detail, as well as the benefits.
The team will be based  in Armadale. The project will commence with a series of workshops (general "mechanical" construction, LabView programming, CAD modelling) which will run after school in December (exact dates to be confirmed) and conducted by BAE Systems and Autodesk. Robot building will commence in January (during the school holidays) and run for no more than six weeks. The girls don't need to come to every build session, but we would expect them to come to at least one per week. The plan is to run three build sessions per week.  More information on the build sessions will be provided later.

I would be happy to hear from anyone who has interested students.


Many thanks and best regards
Therese


Dr Therese Keane

Senior Lecturer in Education

Faculty of Health, Arts and Design

Department of Education and Social Sciences

Building: 14W

Phone: (+613) 9214 8579



Twitter: #SwinEdTech



Swinburne University,

PO Box 218 Hawthorn,

Victoria 3122 Australia

CRICOS Provider 00111D


Therese's Profile<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/health-arts-design/staff-profiles/view.php?who=tkeane>
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