WHATSOC? Robogals!

Interested in engineering, love playing with robots, or fancy teaching as a future career?

Robogals is the uni society which lets you learn about programming and share your knowledge with the next generation of female techies through workshops with local schools. We spoke to this year’s President, Io Swift Wolf, and committee, to find out more about the student initiative trying to break gender stereotypes.

What is the aim of the society?

We want to encourage more kids, especially girls, to get involved in engineering and programming.

We do this by volunteering our time to go into schools and run workshops, where we show kids how to program with robots made of Lego (called Lego Mindstorms or EV3). They learn how to make the robots respond to movement, not to fall off tables, complete simple tasks and loads more!

Why should students want to get involved?

Being part of Robogals is really rewarding. It’s also a great chance to learn new skills and get experience working with kids, and something worthwhile to add to your CV.

Imparting techie wisdom to the future generation

What do you get up to at your regular meetings/workshops?

Our meetings are a mix of playing with the robots ourselves and workshops where we might learn skills so that we can teach or work collaboratively on a project. For example in our last workshop we decided to come up with functioning robot designs that resemble different animals and built lions, alligators, dragons and gorillas.

Do you have to be an engineering student to get involved?

No! As long as you’ve used a keyboard and mouse before, we can show you how to program and make a robot walk around the room in less than an hour!

Robot-filled fun at a school workshop

As the aim focusses on getting young women into engineering, is the society only open to female members?

Absolutely not! If you have an interest in programming/robotics, want to get some experience teaching or just want to come along and have fun, we are the place for you!

What is a typical society social?

A typical social will either be walking down to Sprinkles for ice-cream and then on to The Hobbit for a pint. Or we like to book out one of the big lecture theatres, order in pizza, and watch a movie.

Find out more about Robogals via their SUSU Groups page here.