This article is not only blatantly dishonest, it's openly misandrist:
They started in 2007 by forming a girls-only team. The girls that had previously watched from the sidelines were now in charge of everything. It didn’t matter if they weren’t good at soldering or didn’t know how to fix a busted drivetrain. They had to figure it out.So, a man helped them improve a robot that the loud-mouthed, strongly opinionated boys built, and they lost. Amazing. If that's not evidence that we need more women in tech, and science, and games, I don't know what is!
The girls started working with a robot that the boys had initially built. Almost immediately, they solved problems that the boys couldn’t. One example: the robot wouldn’t drive straight. The boys tried to correct for this by over-steering, but it wasn’t a real solution. The girls took the robot apart, identified a problem in the drivetrain, and fixed it. Now when the robot needed to operate autonomously, it could complete its tasks without of veering off course.
The girls’ team travelled to San Diego to compete in Dean Kamen’s FIRST robotics competition. The event is akin to a robot death match mashed up with a basketball tournament — robots have to dodge their opponents and score points by winning various games. The girls didn’t make it to the finals, but it was one of the most memorable experiences of their lives. They developed competition strategies without loud-mouthed boys and repaired the robot on the fly without having to defer to the strongly held opinions of the male members of the team.
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