Hi! I’m Parker, rural Washington state college student and wearer of many hats. Most of all, though, I like to think of myself as a builder. I have big ideas, I arm myself with the technical (and occasionally non-technical) tools I need to make them happen, and then I build. I’ve had the opportunity to build some pretty cool things over the last few years….Check them out here!
The path I’ve taken to get here didn’t exist when I started, so I’ve had to break out my machete and clear the way for myself, and maintain the trail for others coming behind me. Keep scrolling to read my story. Trust me, it’s a wild ride.
When I was but a clueless seventh grader, I made a decision that changed my life forever. On a whim, I decided to try out a LEGO robotics camp with a friend. The camp, offered by my local university, had us pair up to build and program a LEGO NXT robot (throwback, amirite?) for a mini competition at the end of the two weeks.
I’m not sure how to describe this experience other than that from the moment I got my hands on the robot kit, I was hooked. The sometimes-tranquil, often-violently-frustrating process of building and programming a little robot scratched an itch that I didn’t know I had. When the camp was over, I knew it was time to seek out more robots. After a season of FIRST LEGO League (the official LEGO robotics competitive league), I skipped on over to my local high school’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team, wherein our team had six weeks to design, build from scratch, wire, and program a 100+ pound robot that would then compete around the state.
I didn’t know it when I first joined, but I was in for a wicked surprise. I walked into my first season ready to learn LabVIEW, the programming language the team used at the time, so that I could help bring one of these “real robots” to life. Instead, I (along with the other girls on my team) got the job of...wait for it...designing the team t-shirt. Across the classroom, the boys got handed the flippin’ pneumatics kit and the team laptop to get rolling on code (our school could only afford one laptop for the team).
To say that my first season experience was frustrating is an understatement. I almost quit the team. But part of me knew that this was my one shot at doing robotics in high school. There weren’t any other robotics teams in my sleepy farming community, so I decided to dig in and learn as much as I could on the side.
During team meetings, I would hang over the shoulder of the coders, and then google any part of their code that I could when I got home. Progress was slow, and the fast-paced nature of the season meant that I never got the chance to actually load software on the robot. Boo. At least we got team t-shirts?
Fast-forward a year. It was the middle of my second season on the team (and my sister Greta had just hopped aboard) when an opportunity suddenly crossed our paths. Our team coach had made the highly-controversial decision to switch the team’s programming language from LabVIEW to C++, and the coders were not happy. (“C++ gives you just enough rope to hang yourself!” I remember one arguing.) Our coach was firm. And our three coders quit the team in protest.
With just a few weeks to go before our first competition of the season, and no C++ code for the robot, my sister and I knew that this was our one shot. This was what we’d been waiting for. And so, having never typed a line of C++ in our lives, we jumped in as the team’s new programmers and hit the books (YouTube tutorials). We spent many long nights alternating between trying to learn the absolute basics of the language and attempting to decode the cryptic documentation for the library that our league used. We got our robot running code THE NIGHT before our first competition.
Seeing that robot run code that I had written was amazing. It was unlike anything that I had experienced before. It was at this exact moment that it clicked for me: this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
However, this experience wasn’t all sunshine and roses. There was an emerging dark side to our robotics adventure that increasingly plagued us at competitions: my sister and I felt utterly alone.
Right from the get-go, we noticed how few girls there were in competitive robotics. I’m sure this is not surprising for many of the people reading this, but to us the lack of girls was shocking. And it wasn’t just that there were few girls in the league. It was that the girls who were on these teams were almost exclusively handling the admin side of things: writing essays to win the team awards, presenting for the team, and...surprise, surprise...designing the team t-shirt. Where were the coders? Where were the builders and circuit masters? The adult mentors in our league had an answer for us.
As we attended more competitions, the conclusion that team mentors had drawn about the gender gap in robotics was becoming crystal-clear. Adult after adult with whom we spoke about this issue, both men and women, believed that this was the result of inherent hard-wiring differences between girls and boys. Boys were just made for technical things, and, well, girls love people and communication! Perfectly simple. “Girls are meandering thinkers, and boys are linear thinkers,” one mentor patiently explained to my mom.
Bull****.
My sister and I (neither meandering thinkers nor lovers of communication) had a very different hypothesis: like us, many girls joined these teams with little-to-no experience. Pair that with a fast-paced season with little opportunity for skill acquisition, and mentors who assume you wouldn’t be into robotics in the first place, and you’ve got yourself in a pickle.
Of course, there are also fundamental problems with the pillars upon which mainstream girl culture is built (why would you be interested in robotics if society tells you that what’s most important is what you look like and how sociable you are?), but that’s another conversation for another day.
And so, all-in-all, the gender gap in robotics was destined from the start. But that didn’t mean we had to accept it. After all, who knows how many girls could have the same life-changing robotics experience that my sister and I had, if only they had a training ground and a robotics subculture made for them, by them?
It was time to get to work. After a year of research and development, we took the plunge and made our first move toward carving out a subculture around girls and robotics where one had never existed before, and creating the ultimate pathway for girls into the insanely magical land of competitive robotics. In 2017, we launched our non-profit, Nerdy Girls.
The way Nerdy Girls would work was simple. Girls who had no experience, but who wanted to get a foothold in the realm of robotics, would sign up and come to secret Friday night meetups (robot building parties that took place under the cover of darkness, complete with a disco party ball). At these meetups, they would battle their ways through six levels of increasingly difficult robotics projects, designed to scale their building, wiring, and coding skills. They would be guided from start to finish by a library of YouTube tutorials that my sister and I would script, film, and edit behind the scenes. They would walk in noobs and walk out masters of robotics, ready to hold a technical role on a competitive robotics team, which would in turn would open the gates to the careers of the future.
And so, despite our sweaty palms and fears of failure, we hosted our inaugural Nerdy Girls meetup on January 13th, 2017 (shout out to Ellensburg Public Library for letting us use their space!). Almost 100 meetups later (over the course of which we’ve provided training to over 50 girls+ in our county), we’ve learned an insane amount. Some parts of Nerdy Girls really worked, while other parts of the system were ready for a pivot.
Over the last few years, we’ve encountered three big challenges: (1) there was no intermediate-to-advanced robotics kit on the market that our more experienced members could dive into (we started by using VEX EDRs, but shortly after our first tutorial dropped, VEX announced that they would be phasing this kit out), (2) we realized that all kinds of kids in our rural, low income area were desperate for robotics opportunities, and (3) the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, rendering our in-person Nerdy Girls model obsolete.
The first issue, aka the complete lack of affordable intermediate robotics kits on the market, was tricky. But we were up for the challenge. It was time to dig in and build our own robotics kit. Vertical integration, baby.
In the summer of 2019, my sister and I employed a divide-and-conquer approach to building our robotics kit. I got to work CADing different robots that could be built with the kit and designing the electrical system. For mechanical parts, we settled on the Actobotics system because it was scalable--the ball bearing-ness of it meant you could build really cool robots with it. As for the electrical side of things, I decided to let an Arduino MEGA 2560 board (open source, cheap, and containing infinite possibilities) be the star of the show. The rest of the parts would be Amazonable, off-the-shelf parts like DC/DC voltage converters, terminal blocks, and motor and servo drivers. I started with essentially no formal electronics knowledge, but with the help of YouTube, the Arduino forums, and blood, sweat, and tears, I was able to get the ball rolling.
My sister Greta tackled the software. Like the absolute beast of a coder she is, she translated pure control algorithm theory (can you say P.I.D.?) into C/C++ that the Arduino brain could understand. She pulled together open source libraries and created an Eclipse IDE-Git-GitHub workflow that was accessible to beginners. She wrote the code that any user could implement to get their robots up and running.
We call this kit Spicy Meatbots, and it’s pretty special. Nerdy Girls members have been beta-testing it since fall 2019, and we hope to launch a version for cool kids everywhere come fall 2021. Read more about Spicy Meatbots here!
But there’s one area that we need to add to the mix: democratizing robotics education for everyone, regardless of their income level. It was time to tackle our second challenge.
Just as stark as the gender gap in our robotics league was the wealthy/low income divide. Teams from the Boeing feeder schools in the greater-Seattle area would dominate our competitions every. Single. Season. Any rural team that could scrape together enough funding to even get their robots on the field would usually fizzle out after just a few seasons (including my team). Where wealthy teams would drop $40k in a single season for their custom-manufactured robots, rural teams would roll in with zip-tie and PVC pipe “scrappy” robots. When rural teams inevitably shut down, that would usually be the end of the ride for kids on these teams. No more robotics experience, no more dreams of studying this stuff in college, no more path to the knowledge workforce of the future.
This issue frustrated us, and sometime during the years when we were gaining invaluable experience with Nerdy Girls, we had a big idea.
Remember the six levels of increasingly difficult robotics projects that Nerdy Girls members have to beat on their paths to robotics mastery? What if we put our curriculum online and made it available to everyone, everywhere? What if we expanded it to cover 23 robots, 220+ YouTube tutorials, making it the most comprehensive path to robotics mastery in the history of the universe?
We’re building this masterpiece as we speak. We call it The Robot Underground. We believe it will be the world’s best robotics curriculum, 100% free and open source for anyone to use. It’s a big, bold vision for the future of robotics education.
Learn more about The Robot Underground here. Our tutorials for it will start dropping in March 2021!
We’re tackling the third challenge (pandemic-proofing the Nerdy Girls model) as I write this: we’re working on building a completely-immersive, narrative-driven, MMORPG-inspired online platform that girls anywhere can log onto to meet up virtually to build robots together. This will change the game forever, and will be the pillar upon which our dreamed subculture around girls and robotics will be built.
More on this soon.
First of all, congrats on making it this far. I want to use this final section to outline what comes next in the life of Parker Mayer™.
Let’s get the top-priority out of the way: I will keep building Nerdy Girls, Spicy Meatbots, and The Robot Underground until I bite the dust. I am passionate about these endeavours, and I am 10,000% committed to solving these issues.
My work on these projects over the years has taught me a critical lesson: if I am willing to pay the price of hard work and dedication, I can do anything I put my mind to. I will apply this lesson to my other passion: working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to tackle my Core Build Areas (read more on them here). These are areas that I want to dedicate my career to and that I believe have the potential to ease human suffering on a massive scale.
Right now, I’m tackling a big short-term goal: getting my bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Math: a skill combo that I think will be especially potent for tackling the issues I care about.
Welp, that’s about it for now. If you are a girl trying to break into robotics, definitely shoot me a DM or something, because I want to know you! And with that, I must sail off into the great unknown. Goodnight.