Happy New Year! We trust that you all had a fun and enjoyable festive season, and a successful 2011. The past year has been a very exciting one for Robogals, and what follows is a quick overview of some of our acheivements:

Robotics workshops

Our chapters in the five major cities of Australia delivered robotics workshops to 773 girls from across 20 schools in the period September 2010 to September 2011, ranging from once-off visits to repeat visits at some schools: at the very top end of the scale, two schools in Brisbane had Robogals come 11 times each, as a regular weekly activity!

The new Robogals Rural & Regional (RRR) programme also made several road trips to regional areas across Victoria, with week-long trips to Ballarat, Latrobe Valley, Mornington Peninsula and Geelong, plus two more day-trips to Geelong, conducting once-off robotics workshops for 1,335 girls from 31 schools in total.

Robogals' chapters in the UK also conducted numerous robotics workshops, for which we don't have the exact figures yet, so stay tuned for our full Annual Report expected in March :)

In surveys of 348 students who participated in Robogals' workshops, they reported their "interest in engineering" on a scale of 1 to 10 as:
- an average of 4.2/10 before the session
- an average of 8.0/10 after the session
Most students also indicated that they knew nothing about engineering prior to the session. As for after the session, one student even wrote: "I learnt that engineering isn't just about engines"!

Talks about engineering

The new Robogals Rural & Regional (RRR) programme this year, funded by the Cochlear Foundation, also brought 20 university students from regional areas around Australia to Melbourne for a training weekend on 13-15 August. The 10 regions represented were Swan Hill, Mildura and Warrnambool in Victoria, Wollongong and Newcastle in New South Wales, Rockhampton and Townsville in Queensland, Hobart in Tasmania, Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and the Canberra area in ACT. These students then returned home to visit schools in their local areas!

As we don't have the resources to run robotics workshops in all those areas, the aim of RRR was to instead visit schools to give inspiring presentations. They spoke to individual classes or to whole school assembles about engineering and technology careers, and the difference that engineering makes to our lives. Between the 20 of them, they spoke at 43 schools, to 1,700+ students in total.

Other

Some of Robogals' other activities included:

• Held the inaugural Robogals Science Challenge (see article below!)
• Robogals in Manchester, Melbourne and Adelaide were judges at their local FIRST LEGO League competitions
• Robogals London had a stall at the Big Bang Fair and held a workshop at the London Science Museum
• Our Western Australia chapter had a stall at the SciTech Science Awareness Expo in Geraldton
• The Bristol chapter had a stall at the Changing Perspectives event at the University of Bristol
• Robogals Adelaide ran an activity at the University of Adelaide's Women in Tech Challenge, which was rated the 2nd best activity of the event (Pictured right: Robogals Adelaide Vice-President Brooke Balogh speaking at the event)
• Our Edinburgh chapter gave a presentation at a women's conference
• We assembled an Advisory Board chaired by Dr. Bronwyn Evans, Senior Vice-President at Cochlear, to advise the Robogals Global executive team on a range of issues
• This year saw the widespread adoption and use of myRobogals by our chapters to manage their member list, send out emails, manage school visits and other functions
• Robogals was internationally recognised through the awarding of the Anita Borg Change Agent Award to us by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (pictured right), and a YouthActionNet Fellowship from the International Youth Foundation.
• And finally, Robogals founder Marita Cheng is currently one of eight finalists for Young Australian of the Year 2012. We await with anticipation the announcement on 25 January!

Thanks

The Robogals Global Team would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to:

• All the Robogals chapter committee members and volunteers, and rural & regional ambassadors, that have made Robogals what it is today!
• All the schools who have given us the privilege of visiting them!
• Our national sponsors in Australia: Beck Engineering, GE Energy, Leighton Holdings and CSIRO as Gold Sponsors, Google as a Silver Sponsor and NICTA as a Bronze Sponsor
• Our national sponsor in the UK: National Grid
• The Cochlear Foundation for their generous grant which made Robogals Rural & Regional possible
• All our Advisory Board members: Bronwyn Evans, Andrea Boyle, Jamie Evans, Bruce Howard and Jessica Wrigley
• All the universities where we have a Robogals chapter, for the support and resources they provide their chapters
• All the girls who entered into the Robogals Science Challenge and their parents.
• Engineers Australia, particularly Glenda Graham, for her amazing support and advice
• Our mentors and friends Victoria Lennox, and Bruce and Robin Campbell, for their advice and support

Bring on 2012!