Today we’d like to introduce you to the Techalongs
Hi TECHALONGS, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
The Techalongs are an all Girl Scout First Tech Challenge Robotics team (FTC team #17062) that practices in a garage in Scottsdale. The idea of forming this all-girls team originated in 2020, just before the outbreak of COVID. Jared Schein, who was a member of the Herberger Howlers (FTC team #13968) collaborated with Diana Laulainen-Schein, a lifetime Girl Scout, to bring FIRST robotics to the Girl Scouts. During lockdown, along with members of Laulainen-Schein’s troops, he offered online workshops to introduce girls in the Pima neighborhood service unit to the basics of robotics. Then in the summer of 2021, a weeklong day camp gave girls the chance to do some hands-on exploration of robotics.
Schein was able to locate a mentor for the team through Girls in Tech and in the Fall of 2022, an interest session was held and the team was formed with just four girls. In their first season, the team earned Judges Choice and Connect Awards and made it to the state championships. Along the way, they learned a lot about gracious professionalism, teamwork, and, of course, robotics.
In the 2023-2024 season, the team grew to six team members and won a total of five awards, including the Promote and Connect State Championship awards. The team has been recognized repeatedly with Connect Awards, which rewards a team’s efforts to reach out to the technical community in their area in an effort to understand opportunities in STEM. Connect Award winners also strive to educate their community about FIRST, First Tech Challenge, and the team. Other awards the team received last season include the Think Award, which recognizes the team’s efforts in chronicling its engineering journey, and the Control Award for excellence in coding the robot.
On the competition floor, the team made the semi-finals in four out of four competitions in 2023-2024, winning the event championship title at the Valley of the Sun qualifier in partnership with team 6174: Automatons and team 20775: Pinnacle Robotics. At the 2024 state championship, the girls finished fourth in the qualifying matches on the Grand Canyon field and served as an alliance captain as a result.
Throughout the year, the team has engaged in numerous outreach projects, teaching younger Girl Scouts about programming and the engineering design process in workshops and at day camp, but their favorite event was Bring Home the Cookies 5K at the end of February where they taught girls how to fold paper airplanes, talked about their team, and let fellow Girl Scouts try their hands at driving the robot.
The current team membership stands at nine girls. A similar explosion in coaching support has grown the team to seven coaches and seven mentors, all of whom switch off to allow the girls to attend practices up to five days a week. This year, the girls have chosen to expand their advocacy for women in STEM, becoming FIRST Like A Girl ambassadors and joining a menstrual equity project that was started by a Girl Scout FRC team out of Los Angeles (the Space Cookies) in 2021. The competition season kicks off in December and the girls are excited to test their robot, who is nicknamed Juliette, after the founder of Girl Scouts.
Techalongs Team Site: https://sites.google.com/view/techalongs/home
Techalongs on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ftc_techalongs/
FIRST Like A Girl: https://firstlikeagirl.com/
m.e. project: https://frc.spacecookies.org/menstrual-equity
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The first year was rough with only four team members, all of whom were in middle school. Most FTC teams are composed of high school boys and part of the whole ethos of FIRST is to work cooperatively with other teams. To say that the boys on the competition field lacked interest in our fledgling team would be accurate but we also were given some very important support by teams, particularly the Herberger Young Scholars Academy (HYSA) teams, as well as Valley X, and the Tie-Dye Samurai.
In our second year, with a vastly expanded coaching staff of mostly 20-somethings (including FIRST alumnus and lifetime Girl Scout Tina Langevin, mechanic/build coach Austin Banghart, lifetime Girl Scout Ariana Schein, and former HYSA Howler Lia Ryan), the team resolved to build a bot that was too good to be ignored and that strategy paid off when we surprised everyone, including ourselves and finished first in the qualifying matches at our first competition. Our coder, Eleanor Lam, also gained a certain amount of notoriety in her second season and was being referred to as “the Girl Who Can Code.” Her accomplishments are particularly notable insofar as we only obtained a coding coach after the close of the second season, so she was working with only long-distance aid from mentors Jared Schein and Markus Roberts.
Other than that, robotics is expensive. The original year was financed through a partnership between the service unit that serves the Scottsdale area in partnership with Girls in Tech. In the second year, Girl Scouts, an FRC team (the Coconuts), BAE, and Girls in Tech all contributed financially to the team. This year the team is being sponsored solely by the Girl Scouts, Arizona Cactus-Pine council.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I have a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota, and I’m in my 35th year as a volunteer for Girl Scouts. Currently, I am a troop leader for three troops that span grades K-12. I don’t necessarily seem like the obvious choice for a robotics coach, but I have also always been a hands-on parent. Supporting my son’s passion for FIRST robotics directly led to the formation of the Techalongs. I’ve also always been pretty good at talking people into volunteering and a large part of the success of the Techalongs is that I’ve been able to pull in a lot of people to support the girls, thereby lightening the load on any single individual.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
FIRST has grown enormously since its inception. I got interested in FIRST because of my son but my instinct was to open it up to Girl Scouts. GSUSA has been working to offer STEM experiences to young women and has an entire series of robotics badges that we leveraged as an entryway for girls into robotics. FIRST robotics, with its emphasis on gracious professionalism is a good fit with the core values of Girl Scouts. I hope that the Techalongs can support and encourage more young women to enter not only FIRST robotics but also STEM fields in general.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sites.google.com/view/techalongs/home
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ftc_techalongs/
- Email: techalongs@gmail.com
Image Credits
All the photos are mine (Diana Laulainen-Schein)
