Lucy Gellman Photo
Beyonce Jones, Tranese Streater and Tayrene Rodriguez at LEAP’s (Yo)unity Bot .
Tayrene Rodriguez jumped into programming headfirst when she learned that she would be building, attaching wires to, and writing code for a robot from scratch. Emiya Pearse didn’t, but found that her four teammates helped her get through it.
Juliyah Lowe surprised herself when she came up with a plan, and assembled her little bot on the first try.
What brought them together Tuesday afternoon was a new after-school initiative that teaches girls coding and robotics at LEAP‘s Jefferson Street headquarters in Wooster Square.
With new funding from a Google RISE Award and grants from the Community Fund for Women and Girls and the Liberty Bank Foundation, LEAP has been able to grow its STEM-minded programming for young women, adding more robust coding classes and new sessions to assemble and program a small machine called the (Yo)unity Bot over several weeks.
The finished bot.
It’s the latest step that the not-forprofit LEAP — its name is an acronym for Leadership, Education & Athletics in Partnership — is taking to address gender disparities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM fields. For a series of weeks, groups of girls ages 9 to 12 learn code, while girls 13 to 15 who are LEAP Leaders in Training work on robotics with student guides from Engineering and Science University Magnet School and LEAP staff members such as Shyrelle Spears, director of LEAP’s Computer Learning Center.
Bringing in speakers including Code.org facilitator and CT Computer Science Teachers Association President Chinma Uche and ESUMS star coding student Danayit Mekonnen, Spears hopes to show young female students the technological feats of which they are capable. Because technology “is still a man’s field,” said Spears.
Justine Tobias fiddles over a bot.
That reality — and the will to change it — is what brought students around their (Yo)unity Bots Tuesday, to wrap up a series of lessons in assembling, wiring, and programming. The third step is the most complicated, said teacher Austin Cepalia, a junior at ESUMS. To pull it off, students need to write accurate code on an external computer and connect it back to the bot through a USB input. Only then will the bot, a wheeled creation of cardboard, wire and plastic no larger than a Barbie doll’s Corvette, move on its own.
The task wasn’t overwhelming for Tayrene Rodriguez, who attends Conte West Hills Magnet School. At 13, she has already decided that she wants to be a computer programmer, and started doing projects that will get her to that professional goal. She recalled building and programming a number of whosits and whatsits with her aunt, an engineering student who lives in New York City. This project “was easy stuff,” she said, but she was grateful for the opportunity.
Emiya Pearse and Briana Fuller.
Fifteen-year-old Emiya Pearse arrived at her first bot session weeks ago with an open mind, but a bitter taste for math. In the midst of learning about frequencies and Newtonian principals in her physics classes at Amistad High School, she wasn’t thrilled about a project that incorporated so much of a subject she didn’t love. But when the sessions started requiring collaboration, teamwork, and orderly planning and decision-making among peers, she warmed to the project. Wiring and programming a small bot could give her the skills to negotiate with group members and parlay her strengths into action. That will help her in her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she said.
“The hardest part was communicating,” said Pearse, motioning to the small bot that she and teammate Briana Fuller had christened a “carplane,” for its aerial appearance. But it was also a learning experience. “We didn’t want to hurt nobody’s feelings,” she said, and it was ultimately “really a team effort.”
The coding class, upstairs.
Meanwhile, Juliyah Lowe’s spatial planning skills paid off. While Pearse and her team members assembled, reassembled, and rebalanced the bot as many as 10 times, Lowe saw her group’s bot come together in three tries. She’ll definitely be trying out more programs like this, she said.
Upstairs, the coding class was bringing in similar results. After girls started their computer and coding skills with a decision-making game earlier this year, students moved on to more complicated formats, learning basic coding for games that they could try out at LEAP.
“It was really hard at first,” said Dolores Hamrick, who attends Strong 21st Century Communications Magnet and SCSU Lab School. “But now it’s easy.”