Robotics and Growing from Failing

Our girls had their first robotics tournament in February. We didn’t go see a match first, we watched a few videos. We didn’t read the whole rule book, just the parts about the robot. We didn’t test our robot first, it wasn’t really working.

Wait, what? That’s correct, I took a group of girls who were unprepared, hadn’t read the rules, had no robotics experience (I didn’t either) and our robot barely worked, to a competition.

The Thursday before they thought about forfeiting, they thought about not going, they couldn’t get the robot to move in a straight line, or move around the field in any meaningful way. But they decided to go.

It has been said that 90% of life is showing up.

These girls showed up! They got the robot moving on Friday, they went to competition on Saturday. We saw robots of every shape and many different ways to lift, push, pick up and shove the elements on the course. Ours didn’t really do many of those things. They had three opportunities to score points in skills challenge, they scored 0. They were afraid we would be disqualified and not get to compete, but instead of sitting in defeat they were saying “there are so many cool robots here, if we don’t compete can we go back to the school and start working on our next design?”

They started to plot and plan what their next robot could look like. They talked to other teams with robots like ours and made some modifications. They didn’t get disqualified, they competed, and they tried every round. They scored 10 points. They found an older girls team who is located near ours and asked to work together and if the older girls could help and mentor them. There were only three girls teams competing out of 23 teams.

Two of our schools agreements are to Participate and to Always do your Best. These girls showed up, they participated and they tried their best. They learned so much that day.

I couldn’t be more proud of them if they had won. The lessons we learned and they way they showed up show how they will show up in the future. They knew they were in over their heads, they knew our robot wasn’t ready for competition, but they tried, they collaborated, they learned from others, they formed relationships and they are ready to rebuild and try again.

Go Girls!