The Robogals of UWA were proud to be a part of the seventh annual Science Awareness Festival held in Kalgoorlie by Scitech in partnership with Rio Tinto. We, together with the UWA School of Indigenous Studies, set up stalls to demonstrate to school students in years 8 to 10 how interesting robotics can be. The festival took place over three days from 24-26 March at the Australian Prospectors and Miners Hall of Fame.

About the festival
Each year, Scitech organises Science Awareness Festivals to create awareness about the importance of science in our everyday lives, the community and careers one can pursue, targeting young children living in remote communities. This year the event showcased interactive displays, hands-on exhibits and stall presentations for over 1,500 students from local secondary schools, giving them a rare opportunity to meet people involved in engineering studies and get a first hand experience of the exciting and new career opportunities that they can pursue.

Our journey
We took the train to Kalgoorlie, a half a day journey to the middle of the continent. It was an experience by itself. The six hour long journey gave us time to work on the programming, fine tune our work and tweak our presentations. But of course we didn't just work on the festival, we also had some fun on the train (which would be irrelevant to talk about here, but if you want to experience it yourself, try to make it into the next team that heads out for an event like this!)

The Robogals stall
Next day, the first day of the festival, we had our stall (pictured above) beside the UWA School of Indigenous Studies and students from Curtin University. We had some really cool LEGO robotics on display. Our aim was to draw the attention of school children into the world of robotics and engineering.

First was the Alpha-Rex (pictured to the left with Erin) which was programmed to sense motion, walk forwards and even say "Hello". Then the Sound Bot that had motion sensors, which would detect the distance of the object or anything else placed in the path of the sensor, and play tones of different frequencies based on the distance. And we had a Robogator, my favourite, that had motion sensors which senses movement in front and responding to it by moving. Finally there was the Colour Sorter that would pick up any colour placed in front of it and the Shooter-Bot, which like others had motion sensors and shot when movement was detected.

The last day was open to the public where we tried to create awareness of engineering and robotics as a future career for children. Overall the 3-day festival was a major success for Robogals. We achieved our goal of creating interest and awareness. Despite our neighbouring stall's attraction with a liquid nitrogen experiment, presentations on wildlife awareness, reptiles, mining and human biology we were able to gather more interest and attention from the school students who thronged around our stall to catch a glimpse of the robots at work.

Robogals Team
The festival was successful thanks to the untiring efforts of the entire team of Robogals WA. Everyone pitched in and did their part for the event. We are proud to be the Robogals, sharing our work and glory together. We had fun and at the same time achieved something by educating school children. We would like to thank the University of Western Australia for its support and Scitech for giving us the opportunity to take part in the event. It was a really rewarding and eye opening experience to us all.

In the future, Robogals intends to take part in Scitech's Science Awareness Festival every year. Also, we are planning to start attending other similar events on a more regular basis.