It might seem overly ambitious to reach out to almost 1000 rural high school students over just 2 days, but the ever-adventurous committee of Robogals WA were recently able to participate in Scitech's Science Fair... and do just that!

Thanks to our wonderful sponsor Sinosteel, 3 of our committee members had the pleasure of visiting the large town of Geraldton (only a few hours out of Perth) to interact with almost 1000 high school students from the area. Four schools' worth of students in years 10 to 12 flooded the Geraldton community hall to listen to talks, participate in engaging activities and get career advice from about twenty stalls, all promoting different careers and studies in science and engineering. The stallholders included university departments, the Gingin Gravity Discovery Centre, wildlife parks, ICRAR, CSIRO and even the local police department.

The Robogals WA girls, Jess, Adina and Emma, were able to set up shop next to the airport security stall with our robots, showbags and lollipops. Not to be outdone by the cute native animals of the Perth Zoo outreach team, we brought our adorable robots—Alpha Rex, Robogator and a nifty little car. We were able to demonstrate this technology to the crowds of interested students, with Robogator being an obvious favourite. A definite highlight of the fair was encouraging a huge crowd of girls and boys to chant "robot fight! Robot fight!" as we unleashed the power of Robogator and Alpha Rex upon each other! Our highly successful stall could often be seen completely swamped by eager students, all attempting to answer chemistry and physics questions for a lollipop.

At the organisers' request, Adina and Emma delivered talks to almost 100 students about studying engineering. Watching the girls in the audience become inspired by our passion for engineering, we were asked questions like "what's the coolest thing you've ever built?" and "do you get to wear a hard hat?" I'm glad to report that we found that about equal proportions of girls and boys, when asked if they liked science and maths, answered yes. We were able to encourage this interest by absolutely dissolving the myth that engineering and science is just for boys. Jess, Emma and Adina, with our degrees in environmental, electrical and civil engineering respectively, spoke about just how much variety there is in the field of engineering. Many students were excited to speak with Jess (our resident environmental engineering student) about the prospect of protecting the environment by working in the industry, an option that few had considered before.

It was exciting to see young girls become intrigued enough by the robots to start asking questions about studying engineering. One girl was genuinely amazed at our little car and its ability to follow a black track and avoid walls; she proceeded to ask a torrent of intelligent questions. I was so amazed by this—while the car's program was reasonably simple, this student was extremely inquisitive and could appreciate the utter awesomeness that is robotics. As someone who studies electronic engineering, I was able to assure her that we did indeed get to play with robots, computers and cool electronic gadgets.

Overall, the Science Fair was a huge success for Robogals WA and went better than we could have imagined. It has had a great effect on our exposure in WA, with Adina being interviewed on ABC radio and the three of us appearing in the Geraldton local newspaper. We hope that over those 2 days we were able to make a positive impact in the lives of the students of Geraldton-both girls and boys-and that we will be able to participate in similar thrilled events in the future.