Robogals!

So, as promised, my Robogals-specific post!

Been promoted from minion to executive committee member of Robogals UQ, a relatively new club that aims to get more girls into science/engineering by bringing robotics programs to schools.  It also runs robotics workshops at UQ itself during the holidays.  It's a global organisation but the UQ branch has a lot of autonomy, so we're looking into making it more of a social group/general purpose robotics club, in addition to the school-based work - we're having a meeting in week 1 to see what people are interested in before we decide exactly where we want to go.  I'm the schools manager, in charge of coordinating school visits, liaising with teachers and parents, that sort of thing.

Working at a stall at O-Week was interesting : ) We had a pretty cool stall, with a humanoid robot, one of those Parrot drones (you know, the quadricopters - I told a bunch of people about the Kinect-controlled one at LCA - responses ranged from awe to skepticism about controlling it without physical feedback), and of course the Lego NXTs we use for school visits.  It was interesting seeing the range of reactions people had.  We noticed that a lot of people seemed way more fascinated by the NXTs, which were just doing really basic line-following, than the humanoid, which was doing a pretty complicated dance routine.  A lot of people said stuff along the lines of "that looks really cool, but it's best admired from a distance..."

Anyway, if anyone's actually reading this, Robogals is looking for all sorts of members, not limited to mechatronics students - education (you do get to work directly with teachers, and maybe design lesson plans!), general stuff like journalism, arts, business (all sorts of marketing, sponsorship, publicity stuff), anyone just interested in robotics.  And despite the name it's certainly not just for girls - over half our members are guys.  You're happy wearing a dress to all Robogals events, aren't you?

http://brisbane.robogals.org.au/contact - linky!