2010: The Year in Review
Written by Marita Cheng, Founder & Director, Robogals Global
4 January 2011
It is with great pleasure that I share with you Robogals’ accomplishments over the past year.
A year ago today, Robogals had 6 chapters – 5 in Australia, and one in the UK. Now, following the UK Bootcamp in London, and the Asia Pacific Conference in Sydney, Robogals has grown to have 12 chapters in 4 countries around the world! Our chapters have done some wonderful things this past year including our core activity of teaching schoolgirls robotics, mentoring kids into robotics competitions, putting on community events such as robotics camps and a science fair, and participating in science festivals and forums.Entirely run by university-student volunteers, we set ourselves the goal of teaching 1000 primary school girls worldwide in 2010. Not only did we reach this goal, we smashed it, by managing to have over 1500 primary school girls participate in our programmes, from over 50 schools!
We also set ourselves the goal of holding an event in each city where we have a Robogals chapter, and managed to hold 4 major events across 3 cities, and many smaller ones across nearly all our chapters.
These tremendous result would not have been possible without the tireless work of our Robogals executive committee members at each of our chapters. Of our 750 members, this includes 70 executive committee members and 130 active volunteers across all of our chapters.
To create a structure whereby all this could happen, the Global team has this year created our websites, our newsletter "The Amplifier", our portal and management system "myRobogals", and new relationships within the engineering community. Perhaps our greatest efforts this past year though, have been put into our SINE, Seminars Inducting New Exec, where we drastically updated all our training materials to better equip our executive members to lead their Robogals chapters. To engage the local community, we also organised “The Robots Are Coming”, a robotic art exhibition in the middle of the Sydney CBD to coincide with our Sydney Conference (remotely organised from Melbourne!) What's more, our Global team had only 3 people in it in January, and only grew to more people from May!
Looking ahead, our Robogals chapters around the world have many plans they are looking forward to executing, including more science fairs, robotics camps, dinners, robot dances and competitions. For the Global team, we have been busy organising SINEs all around the world, the Robogals Rural and Regional programme, a Robogals Blog, a newsletter aimed at schoolgirls, a new Robogals website, touching up myRobogals, and establishing even more valuable relationships with companies around the world. We can’t wait!
For the great fun this journey has been, I would like to thank all of you for your support.
- To all the executive committee members, volunteers and members for all the fabulous work you do.
- To the university staff members for supporting each of our chapters.
- To the staff we work with at our partnering organisations Beck Arndt Engineering, the Cochlear Foundation, GE, Engineers Australia – Victoria Division and SMS Global.
- To my mentors and friends Jamie Evans, Bruce Howard, Bronwyn Evans, Ed Custeau, Victoria Lennox, Robin and Bruce Campbell.
- And finally, to the Global team Ashley Toh, Jia Choong, Britney Martin, Mark Parncutt, Hamish Graham, Shu Jie Lam, Hannah Rachmat and Sonya Chan for inspiring me everyday with your passion, commitment, creativity and talent.
Cheers to a great 2010 and looking forward to a fantastic 2011,
Marita Cheng
Founder and Director
Robogals
Read further, including a short paragraph from each chapter in the January 2011 edition of The Amplifier
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