NEW TEAM PUTS FOCUS ON GIRLS, WOMEN IN STEM By Shannon Mann
In July, employees of Caterpillar Clayton hosted the Techno Tigresses on a tour of their facility and test track.
It’s a woman problem. They all say it. Big business, media, government — there’s really no denying it. The fact is that the number of women in a vast array of STEM fields is small, and that needs to change. But as the North Carolina Department of Instruction kicks off its newest campaign to attract more women into the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) field of computer science, something more grassroots is taking place in Johnston County. Earlier this year, Clayton became home to the newest FIRST Lego League robotics team. This rookie team of middle-school students is only the sixth FLL 34 | JOHNSTON NOW
competition team registered from one of the state’s heaviest populated counties, and the first allgirl team to represent the area. FIRST is a STEMfocused, robotics program that was founded in 1989. The program promotes school-aged students working together to research real world problems, develop innovative solutions and present those solutions to panels of judges and community leaders, all while building and coding robots for regional, national and international competitions. Today, there are 600,000 students involved in FIRST programs across 112 countries. Teams can be organized within traditional schools, home
schools and communities. Leigh Dement, a Clayton native and co-coach of the Techno Tigresses, said that the team formed because several girls wanted a larger role in the design, build and coding of the robot, but on most teams these tasks are taken over by boys, which turned the girls off. Sydney Matisoff, a seventh grader at Neuse Charter School, home to the first FLL teams in the county, is a veteran of the robotics program; however Matisoff took a two-year break until she was asked to be a founding member of the Techno Tigresses in late February. “I didn’t have as much fun my first year because the boys treated me like
I was a baby,” she said. “There was only one other girl on the team and she was leaving, and the boys basically dominated everything.” Her plight of being in the minority was not uncommon. Kaitlyn Nolte, another seventh grader on the team, was the only middle-school girl at Southside Christian School taking a robotics elective course. “I wanted to take the class because I’ve been to a couple camps and have always been interested in robots,” she said. “I always thought it was fun to make your own machine and it do what you program it to do. I wish more girls would have been in the class.”
