As a new academic year kicks off in Australia, and temperatures are rising in the Orientation Week booths Australia-wide, four Robogals chapters share their fondest memories.

ANU (Canberra): Thanks to everyone who made O-week a success at ANU and especially to our volunteers who helped run our first market day stall!

We had fantastic bookmarks to give away, a fun guessing competition with cool prizes, made new contacts with the friendly stalls next to us and talked to many LEGO enthusiasts.

On market day we had 156 students sign up and now have over 30 trained volunteers from our training sessions held in week 1.

UNSW (Sydney): For the UNSW orientation week Robogals UNSW had a stall right in the middle of the action. Armed with lollies, a dancing robot and plenty of smiles we set about trying to recruit as many new faces as possible.

We also grabbed a quick sausage at the Engineering welcome bbq where we were able to recruit some more volunteers and at the same time fill our stomachs.

By the end of the week Robogals UNSW now has more than 150 members on the mailing list and some of the recently signed up volunteers have already been trained.

Overall the UNSW O-week was a very hot but successful effort for Robogals UNSW.

Adelaide: Robogals Adelaide returned to Uni last week to join in the festivities at Adelaide Uni's annual O'week.

Frances, Kieran, Michael, and Justina enjoyed the day in the sun chatting to new students about Robogals aims, and managed to sign up a bunch of new volunteers. Many people were attracted to the stall by the robot demonstrations that were running throughout the day, including the usual robots used in school workshops as well as the Robogator.

On top of this, Justina and Michael were able to hand out fliers introducing Robogals Adelaide at the first year engineering orientation lecture in order to increase awareness of the organization.

Starting next week, we should be seeing Robogals Adelaide get together with the new recruits in an informal Meet'n'Greet to get things started for 2012.

UQ (Brisbane): Robogals UQ spent the day playing with cool robots, eating delicious cookies and meeting a lot of friendly people at the UQ Market Day, 2012.

The day started with the team, at various stages of being awake, arriving at our Robogals UQ club table at 8am. We started unpacking our many bags of awesome robots, decorations, banners and delicious cookies and set up our conspicuously robotic stall.

We spent the rest of the very sunny and humid day handing out fliers, drinking free ice-tea and just meeting a lot of really friendly robotics/education enthusiasts.

We welcome our new volunteers and look forward to getting to know you all!