Parker: When I was but a wee seventh grader, I made a decision that changed my life forever. On a whim, I decided to try out a LEGO robotics camp with a friend. The camp, offered by my local university, had us pair up to build and program a LEGO NXT robot (throwback, amirite?) for a mini competition at the end of the two weeks.

I’m not sure how to describe this experience other than that from the moment I got my hands on the robot kit, I was hooked. The sometimes-tranquil, often-violently-frustrating process of building and programming a little robot scratched an itch that I didn’t know I had. When the camp was over, I knew it was time to seek out more robots. After a season of FIRST LEGO League (the official LEGO robotics competitive league), I skipped on over to my local high school’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team, wherein our team had six weeks to design, build from scratch, wire, and program a 100+ pound robot that would then compete around the state.

I didn’t know it when I first joined, but I was in for a big bowl of reality soup. I walked into my first season ready to learn LabVIEW, the programming language the team used at the time, so that I could help bring one of these “real robots” to life. Instead, I (along with the other girls on my team) got the job of...wait for it...designing the team t-shirt. Across the classroom, the boys got handed the flippin’ pneumatics kit and the team laptop to get rolling on code (our school could only afford one laptop for the team).

To say that my first season experience was frustrating is an understatement. I almost quit the team. But part of me knew that this was my one shot at doing robotics in high school. There weren’t any other robotics teams in my sleepy farming community, so I decided to dig in and learn as much as I could on the side.

During team meetings, I would hang over the shoulder of the coders, and then google any part of their code that I could when I got home. Progress was slow, and the fast-paced nature of the season meant that I never got the chance to actually load software on the robot. Boo. At least we got team t-shirts?

Greta: After seeing Parker and her team compete at the end of their season with dozens of other 100-pound robots, I was intrigued. I had no idea what building, wiring, or coding was, but seeing those big boy bots going head-to-head tingled my senses. I decided that I would join the team next season, without knowing what to expect. At all. Oh, young Gregothy.

Greta + Parker: Fast-forward a year. It was the first season that both of us were on the team, and we were gearing up for another few months of over-the-shoulder-looking when an opportunity suddenly dropped into our laps. Our team coach had made the highly controversial decision to switch the team’s programming language from LabVIEW to C++, and the coders were not happy. (“C++ gives you just enough rope to hang yourself!” we remember one arguing.) Our coach was firm. And our three coders quit the team in protest.

With just a few weeks to go before our first competition of the season, and no C++ code for the robot, we knew that this was our do-or-die moment. This was what we’d been waiting for. And so, having never typed a line of C++ in our lives, we jumped in as the team’s new programmers and hit the books (YouTube tutorials). We spent many long nights alternating between trying to learn the absolute basics of the language and attempting to decode the cryptic documentation for the library that our league used. With the clock ticking down, we had a breakthrough of epic proportions and got our robot running code at 10:00pm, THE NIGHT before our first competition.

Seeing that robot run code that we had written was amazing. It was unlike anything that we had experienced before. It was at this exact moment that it clicked for both of us: this is what we wanted to do for the rest of our lives.

However, this experience didn’t turn out to be all sunshine and roses. There was an emerging dark side to our robotics adventure that increasingly plagued us at competitions: we felt utterly alone.

Right from the get-go, we noticed how few girls there were in competitive robotics. And it wasn’t just that there were few girls in the league. It was that the girls who were on these teams were almost exclusively handling the admin side of things: writing essays to win the team awards, presenting for the team, and...surprise, surprise...designing the team t-shirt. Where were the coders? Where were the builders and circuit masters?

As we attended more competitions, the conclusion that team mentors within the league had drawn about the gender gap in robotics was made clear to us. It was just a little hardwiring difference, they would tell us. Boys were just wired for technical things, and, well, girls love people and communication! Perfectly simple. “Girls are meandering thinkers, and boys are linear thinkers,” one mentor patiently explained to our mom. But that’s okay, they would say. Everybody has a role on the team.

But the two of us (neither meandering thinkers nor lovers of communication) had come to a very different set of conclusions: (1) girls won’t be able to break into technical roles--and have the same life-changing experience that we had--unless they walk onto these competitive teams with technical skills, and (2) that will only happen if there is cultural context for girls to pursue those technical skills in the first place.

Something needed to change, so we decided to take the problem head on and get to WORK. After almost two years of research and development, we were ready. It was time to launch.

Greta + Parker: In 2017, we took a giant leap into the unknown and launched our non-profit, Nerdy Girls. Nerdy Girls is carving out a culture around girls and robotics where none had ever existed before. We host weekly Friday night meetups (robot building parties that take place under the cover of darkness, complete with fire beats and a disco party ball) for teen girls where they can battle their way through a systematic progression of robot builds and programming languages. The curriculum is made up of 20-30 YouTube tutorials that we developed. We designed it to be the ultimate training ground where a girl comes in with zero technical skills and goes on a difficult, years-long quest to become a master robot trainer. She walks away ready to hold a technical role on a competitive team and ready for higher education in a technical field.

Nerdy Girls also launched 2 all-girl competitive robotics teams that took eastern Washington by storm, qualifying for the State Championship in both of their first two seasons. Nerdy Girls is 100% youth-led (no adults, no coaches, no mentors), with members ranging from 6th-12th grade. The older members (Guardians) guide the younger members (Apprentices), with each generation responsible for training the next.

Now, fast forward a few years. As of today, we’ve hosted almost 100 Friday night robot building parties for teen girls across the land, we’ve developed a library of robotics YouTube tutorials, and we’ve provided hands-on robotics training to hundreds of youths in our community. We know that what we have built is only the tip of the iceberg, but still, it has been amazing for us to see how, over time, this experience has changed the way our girls+ view themselves, and how it’s changed the trajectory of their lives.

Though the 2020 pandemic turned everything on its head for us and our members, it ended up being the impetus for us to radically reimagine what Nerdy Girls could be. When the world went into lockdown, we sat down, threw off all perceived constraints, looked at everything with fresh eyes, and hatched a big, bold plan to transform Nerdy Girls into a robotics training ground of epic proportions, something ne’er-before-seen on this planet. Read about our Master Plan here.