Anderson ‘Fembots’ join guys in geek love

Photo by Nathan Gray

Students in the robotics class at the Career and Technology center in Williamston are preparing for a robotics competition to be held on Saturday.

Photo by Nathan Gray

Students in the robotics class at the Career and Technology center in Williamston are preparing for a robotics competition to be held on Saturday.

ANDERSON COUNTY — Two girls clad in matching pink “Fembots” T-shirts and psychedelic canvas sneakers crouch on the ground, screwdrivers in hand.

In front of them, a small silver square robot on wheels lurches forward for an instant. As they rush to disable the machine, an acrid smell fills the air.

“Yep, you burned out the motor,” says their teacher, Mandy Orzechowski. “Make sure that one makes it into my bad motor box.”

As they work to repair their hockey puck wrangling robot, another team, this one of all guys, begins to maneuver their robot via remote control.

The girls are one of three robotics teams that are part of the Anderson School District 1 and 2 Career and Technology Center robotics class.

All three teams will compete in the “For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology,” or FIRST, Tech Challenge competition in April. The competition, this year to be held in Atlanta, will pit 100 robotics teams from around the world against each other.

But to Orzechowski and her fellow teacher, Cindy Langley, the girls are part of the reason they are teaching.

The class isn’t only about the competition, Orzechowski says. It’s about getting students “geeked up” about engineering and getting them ready for the real world. And showing girls how cool engineering can be is part of that, she says.

A former chemical engineer, Orzechowski says she left the corporate world to get students excited about math, science and engineering.

“We both truly believe that if somebody who wasn’t totally jacked up about engineering didn’t come in and teach this, this generation of kids would be lost,” she says.

For Orzechowski and Langley, the group of six girls is an indication they are succeeding.

Team members Sara Kennedy and Courtney Olinski, both from Belton Honea Path High School, chose Project Lead the Way High School Engineering program to get out of a computer course requirement.

For 2-1/2 hours every other day, the students work on a variety of engineering projects, including robotics, journaling their progress as any engineer or scientist would, and learning how to develop solutions to problems where there is no one right answer.

Their love for engineering has also influenced the “Fembots” team. The six girls also hold a summer engineering camp for elementary school students, work in the community and hope to start a FIRST Lego League for fourth- and fifth-graders next year.

“They want to get other girls interested in the program,” Orzechowski says.

Orzechowski and Langley’s enthusiasm for engineering has already started to impact some of the students.

“I would never have thought I’d be interested in engineering,” Kennedy says. “But now, I want to be a biotech engineer.”

And that’s part of the excitement for Orzechowski and Langley.

“If you can just look at changing one student, maybe a student who would go on to a two-year tech college, then you can see what a difference you can make,” Orzechowski says. “If you can give them an appreciation of engineering, you have systematically changed their world by changing their earning power.”

But in a course where the teacher has no answer key and the solutions to problems are as varied as the students themselves, students are also being prepared for the real world, Langley says.

“A lot of these students will come out of high school with an understanding of engineering near that of a college student,” she says.

And they come out with an understanding of how the real world works too, Orzechowski says.

“They say to us the problem is too big, there’s too little time and there’s not enough money,” she says. “It’s exactly like what they will deal with in life.”