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How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No.20

Last year, a group of researchers and robotics educators experimented to see how they can get more girls engaged in their activities. And they succeeded.

This sounds like a perfect story to kick off this year!

Recognizing the problem

Teknologiskolen, a Danish non-profit organization offering weekly classes in technology, noticed that despite the continuous growth, very few girls aged 10-16 attend their classes or the summer camp. While research also shows that participating in STEM activities can improve girls' self-efficacy and attitude towards technology, their second problem is that the girls in the 10-16 age group who attend Teknologiskolen rarely return for the next season or camp.

Often, the attending girls could be observed acting disinterested in the projects and feeling inadequate at constructing the requested machines. It should be noted that the typical projects offered often involve line-following robots, color-sorting machines, and competing robots such as sumo robots. In these projects, the dominating construction material is LEGO Technic, which they perceived as very boyish and difficult.

Research within this area has also shown that while boys prefer function and task-oriented projects, girls are interested in more contextualized projects, like how technology can help humans.

Previous attempts

At TS, previous experiments have been carried out, altering the contextual relations in the projects, and trying to let participants work with other materials. This has been successful to some degree.

Even though it made the participating girls in the 10-16 age group decisively more interested and engaged, it did not result in a significant increase in the number of female participants.

In addition, while girls in a previous research study held the highest learning outcome when working in mixed-gender groups, research also suggests that they prefer girls-only groups.

And the solution that worked

In 2020, they decided to implement their learnings and re-engineered their annual summer camp by creating a girls-only team, which employed highly contextualized projects and emphasized everyday materials, like cardboard, paint, and glue.

Here is what they changed

Promotion: The main difference between the descriptions of Team 3 and Team 1 and 2 was that the potential for robot technology to help humans and animals was mentioned, without providing any specific contexts for this.

In addition, a list of prototyping materials to be used in their projects, such as cardboard, paper, glue, and fabric, was mentioned. Participants (girls-only) who signed up for Team 3 were asked to fill out a short initial survey regarding their interest in the following ER themes: Smart homes, with a focus on persons with a physical disability (61.5%); traffic safety (23.1%); interactive art (38.5%) and wearables/intelligent clothing (46.2%).

Projects: During the camp, several projects and contexts were explored and worked on. Firstly, there was the automatic soap dispenser, which served as an introduction to robotics and automation, and then they included interactive art and smart homes.

These three topics were chosen based on the interest survey collected from Team 3 participants before the camp.

The result?

The result was a significant increase in the number of participating girls and in their attitude towards technology, which at the end of the camp, matched that of the boys.

The girls-only team was the main reason for the higher number of participating girls, while the change in attitude was due to the highly contextualized projects and selection of materials.

Here are some more details:

Team 3 had the highest results when it comes to social interactions and making friends in the camp. Furthermore, while the participants' initial interest in robotics was present before the camp, the confirmation of there being other girls at the camp and of not risking being the only girl at a camp full of boys was expressed as being the decisive factor when deciding to attend the camp.

In comparison, none of them mentioned the slight difference between the advertisement materials for T2 and T3, mentioning the potential for robot technology to help humans and animals and examples of prototyping materials. With this in mind, we argue that the implementation of the girls-only team had the largest effect regarding the significantly higher number of participating girls at the camp.

The high contextualization of the projects and the change in materials turned out very efficient in teaching and engaging. Overall, the participants were generally observed as being very satisfied with the contextualization of the projects, which they found relevant. In addition, the chosen materials were found to afford creativity without exhibiting the feelings of inadequacy that can stem from having to scale the technical barrier that the LEGO platform can present.

What now?

This is just a good proof that girls don’t have aversion towards technology, just towards the way we present it to them. Tap your self on the back 👏 for recognizing it and continue reading this newsletter.

Stay engaged and we will keep on providing ways to contextualize, socialize and engage your daughter by using technology.

One thing you can do, is to share this newsletter with some other parents. This way, you are doing your part in ensuring that your daughter is not the only girl interested in tech 💪 Sharing is caring!