• Blog
  • Archives
  • Bio
  • Awards
  • Speaking
  • Book
  • Contact

Your work is never done

Published: Sunday, 07 April 2013

When I started Robogals, I thought going to schools and teaching girls robotics should get more to choose physics, chemistry and advanced maths; then in turn engineering at a tertiary level.

After running Robogals for two years, I realised that I never would have been a beneficiary of a program like Robogals, being from Cairns, a remote regional city that was 2.5 hours by plane from the nearest city of over 1 million residents.  I realised city kids have a plethora of extra-curricula choices, whereas rural and regional kids hardly have any.

So I started the Robogals Rural and Regional programme, where our chapters pack up a car full of volunteers, robots and laptops; go to a rural and regional area, and teach as many girls as they can in a week.

After running that for half a year, I realised that we were still not reaching kids in my hometown of Cairns, and that it would be very costly for us to do so.  So I started the Robogals Science Challenge, where kids from all over the country could do a science experiment at home with a mentor, film a 4-minute video and submit it online to win some great prizes.  We had some Cairns girls enter that.

Six months later, I travelled for 6 weeks visiting 15 organisations in 4 countries to find strategies for getting girls into engineering, and I found even more ideas for tackling the lack of girls in engineering issue.

Your work is never done.  There's always more to do and more to learn.  But you start by taking the first step, and continue by learning along the way.

About Me

Marita ChengForbes named me a world's top 50 woman in tech & 30 Under 30. I founded Robogals and Aipoly and was Young Australian of the Year 2012. Currently working on robotics company Aubot. I'm the youngest Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and I give speeches around the world.

I tweet @maritacheng and I'm on Facebook.

Subscribe

Enter your email address to receive my latest blog posts: 

 

Random Articles

  • Aipoly launches!

    We launched Aipoly two days before CES 2016, where we were given a booth for free, as one of five winners of the first CEA Foundation "Technology...

  • Shell Eco-Marathon Asia

    I’m very excited to announce that I have been named the 2019 Shell Eco-Marathon Ambassador for Australia. The concept of the Shell Eco-Marathon stems...

  • Good Weekend feature

    "Good Weekend" magazine (included every Saturday in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers) was interested in what I was up to, so they...

  • SBS Small Business Secrets

    SBS came and filmed a short segment at the 2Mar Robotics office for their SBS Small Business Secrets program.  It aired on 23 October. Watch the...

  • YouthActionNet Global Fellowship Preparations

    On 17 May this year, over two months after I'd submitted my application, I received an exciting email in my inbox.  "Congratulations!  You have been...

  • Sole founder or co-founders?

    I was starting up my new start-up and I was finding it hard to get my desired co-founder to commit.  So I thought back over my experiences of the...

  • The Bubble

    I used to think the bubble was a bad thing.  The huge number of people who called themselves an entrepreneur.  The over-inflation of entrepreneurs in...

  • Al Jazeera Women Make Science Documentary

    From September to December 2019, Al Jazeera English followed me around and filmed an update on all my projects: Robogals, Aipoly, Teleport, my...

  • Remo Office Visit

    Remo Giuffré, Founder and Director of TEDxSydney and Founder of General Thinking, and his lovely daughter Lola (an engineering student at the...

  • Where are you not looking?

    You’ve brainstormed and tried all the keywords that you could think of in Google, you’ve asked Jeeves, you’ve spoken to your lecturers and you’ve...

Enter your email address to receive my latest blog posts: 

 

Scroll to Top