Category Archives: FIRST Robotics

why a FIRST robotics WFFA essay means so much

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FIRST robotics competition team 694 nominated me as their Woodie Flowers Award candidate this year. (I won the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award in 2012 at the NYC regional. That was a long time ago so the essay was completely different).

This award is to celebrate effective communication in the art and science of engineering and design.” The students write an essay about the mentor they nominate. I encourage all teams to submit an essay. Both because “you have to be in it to win it” and also because it is a great way to show your mentor that you appreciate them.

And it definitely worked out that way. I LOVED reading the essay the students submitted today. I got to see the Google doc a few hours before submission. Which included three sections

Part 1: Bullet notes from students brainstorming

I enjoyed reading this part because it let me see what the students were thinking. And also the ideas they had that didn’t make it into the essay due to space constraints. For example, they included “nighttime rehearsals.” I think they were right not to include this in the final essay. But it was still nice to see those practice sessions were appreciated!

Part 2: Quotes from student members about me

This year, the students included some quotes in the essays. Seeing the quotes they came up with draw from was a lot of fun. Some were things I would have recollected. Others were things I didn’t think anything of at the time. For example:

At FLR after 694 won the Impact Award, she made sure to give due credit to PulseCrew and the whole team for making it possible -> makes everyone feel included and part of the team community 

I absolutely did this. What I didn’t do is reflect on the impact. Seeing it written down gives me a happy feeling because it shows I included people without thinking about it. And inclusion is one of the FIRST core values, so that’s great!

Part 3: The Essay

As I started reading the essay I immediately smiled. What the students don’t know is that I got that bow in 2018 or so because the girls on the team that year ordered bows as swag. When one of them handed me a bow and asked if I would wear it at competition. I was hesitant. I’m not a frilly/bow person. I said I would wear it to a Saturday meeting and then decide. I did always put my hair up in a half ponytail and the bow felt this same. So I said yes. Then at the NYC regional, a volunteer was looking for me and described me as “the volunteer with the big red bow.” That beats the pants off “the medium height lady with the brown hair.” So the bow became a thing that I wear now. I like that the girls on the team years ago had a transitive impact on a student this year.

A bright red bow, used to mitigate the missing presence of red from StuyPulse’s t-shirt, which was caused by the absolute necessity of wearing the FIRST Volunteer t-shirt instead as the NYC FRC Volunteer Coordinator, seemed to shine and speak to me from the back of Jeanne’s head. 

There was so much in the essay that I enjoyed reading. This passage resonated with me because *I* came to the FIRST community from the outside. (I’m not an alum or a teacher or a parent. I found out about FIRST from a public demo 694 around 2008. They told me the event was free. I went and then started volunteering. Then in 2010, Java was a choice of programming language and I started as a mentor.) When I won the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award in 2012, one of the students (Alex) in software asked me “do you feel like a part of the FIRST community.” That was the exact moment where I felt like I did!

Wearing that pink tiara, I felt like a part of the robotics community; watching Jeanne speedwalk throughout the venue keeping order, I felt in awe of the FIRST community, recognizing that there is so much to do, so much dedication and opportunity. 

I like that they included things that were important to me. While I don’t know about magic :), I am proud of the fact that they’ve never seen me code for the robot. [I have done work there and I did some writing towards my book in the lab. So they have seen me code. But that’s not robot code]

having never touched the keyboard and instead watched us code while speaking words of advice or magic 

Then there were memories from the past. This was a quote from something that happened freshman year for a student who is now a senior. Granted I’ve given other students similar advice. But it’s cool that this student remembers it!


She made me hold paper when I first tried out for impact. ‘If you’re holding something, you can’t put your hands in your pockets and you can’t fidget 

And then the ending was great. I’ve always had mixed feelings about women in tech stuff. Like when I got asked to be on a panel, my thought process along the lines of “I wish gender in tech didn’t matter”, “but it does and girls/women need role models”, “I guess I should”…. This sentence resonates for me because I didn’t talk about being a female in STEM. I was me; who was a role model by happening to be female while mentoring on software and awards and just being there.


At competitions I now wear a red bow in my hair, proud to be a girl in STEM and happy to be a part of this FIRST community, with a mentor like Jeanne. 

Finally

Thank you to everyone who was involved in the writing of this essay. It means so much to me. The time you spent on writing was very much worth it.

FTC Judge vs Judge Advisor

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I’ve been judging FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) competitions for many years. It’s a lot of fun. The kids tell you about their robot and outreach and learnings and more. You also negotiate with other judges to determine the award winners. And the day ends with some super excited kids finding out the result. It’s a great day.

There’s also a judge advisor role. The description includes

The Judge Advisor coordinates the judging process, which includes facilitating group deliberation sessions, ensuring the award decisions are made, and the awards script is written. Sometimes the Judge Advisor trains judges and can help in scheduling the judging interviews. The Judges, Judge Advisor Assistant, and Judge Match Observers look to the Judge Advisor for training materials, schedules, and other general questions throughout the
event.

I was asked a few years ago about being Judge Advisor and passed. I like judging a lot. The judge advisor doesn’t get to interview the teams or make any decisions/negotiate. They are a manager and facilitator.

I got to the event on Saturday and was greeted with the event coordinators telling me their judge advisor couldn’t come unexpectedly and could I do it. I said yes. While it isn’t my first choice of role, I am qualified to. I was also the most experienced judge in the room (by a good amount.) I also appreciate that they asked/told me in the form of a question. If they had asked me two weeks ago, I’d have said no because there was still time to find someone more excited about the role. Day of, choices are limited!

What’s interesting about the combination of managing and facilitating is that I very much like facilitating and very much dislike managing. I was able to train folks, form groups, enforce standards and keep things on track.

I definitely relied on crowd sourcing. I wrote constraints on the board and explained what I was trying to accomplish for groups. Having a dozen people “check your work” real time is great quality control!

Overall, it was fine. We accomplished what we needed to and the judges/event staff were happy with how things went. But I still greatly prefer judging and will continue signing up as a judge for future events!

The circle of FRC and the importance of outreach

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Yesterday, Stuyvesant Robotics did a demo at the Winter Garden in Lower Manhattan from 4-7pm. This was very special to me because I found out that FIRST robotics existed at a demo from the same team and the same location. It was many years ago, in fact some of the students doing the demo weren’t even born yet!

Me standing in front of a robot at the winter garden

I’m not exactly sure when the last demo there was but I think it was 2006 or 2007. I remember attending one competition as a spectator and another as a volunteer before volunteering as a mentor starting the 2009-2010 season. Either way, that’s a long time ago.

It’s a lot of fun at an outreach event because you get to share with others what makes this cool. And you get to see excited little kids learn about the robot. The pictures also shows driving a smaller FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) robot and rolling the ball to the big FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) robot to acquire it.

You never know who you will reach at an outreach event. They got me all these years ago. Coming full circle and seeing the event in the same place as a team member was great. Hopefully it won’t be well over another decade before the next demo in this location!

Teenagers showing two young children a robot
Young child driving a robot
young child rolling a ball to a robot