In many cases, careers in STEM are well-paying and rewarding. Depending on the sector, the job growth rate can be promising. It’s these important perks and lack of concrete negatives that have many parents, teachers, and professionals encouraging students to consider a future career in STEM. Unfortunately, many students are turned off by jobs pertaining to STEM due to lack of self-confidence or a preconceived view that these jobs aren’t “cool.” Many groups are popping up around America to combat these falsities, promote new ways of learning, and to build confidence among kids.

One such group, BadgerBOTS Robotics Corporation, spoke with Product Design & Development to discuss how it uses games and other activities to make kids more interested in STEM.

According to Johanna Taylor, lead educator at BadgerBOTS, BadgerBOTS began in 2003 as a single team of students from James Madison Memorial High School in Madison, Wis. Due to increased interest, the team expanded, eventually leading to the students running their own summer camp programs within Madison. The money gained from those program allowed the operation to expand even more, becoming the educational non-profit it is today.

BadgerBOTS members participate in a number of competitions, one being the “FIRST—For Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology—Tech Challenge Robotics Competition,” which promotes STEM skills through a series of games.

Perhaps the most interesting game BadgerBOTS competed in during the 2015-16 FIRST Tech Challenge season was “RES-Q.”

According to the FIRST Tech Challenge website, FIRST RES-Q is a game based on real-life rescue scenarios that mountain explorers and climbers face. Two “alliances” of two robots each compete against one another in a 12 foot by 12 foot square field bordered by foot high walls and a floor made of soft foam. An alliance is made of two teams that have been randomly paired together. The field includes “mountains” with alliance-specific climbing areas. These mountains, as well as the goals for scoring, are placed in two corners of the field. A zip line starts at the top of each mountain and ranges to the playing field wall.

The teams have their programmed robot autonomously score by achieving a variety of different feats, with the amount of points awarded depending on the feat accomplished. These feats include: “’resetting’ Rescue Beacons; delivering Rescue Climbers to a shelter; parking on the mountain; and parking in the Rescue beacon repair zone or floor goal,” according to the website. Teams can also gain points when the robots transport debris from the playing field to a mountain or floor goal, and when the robot hangs from a Pull-up Bar during the last 30 seconds of the match, a period known as the “End Game.” The match starts with the 30-second-long “Autonomous” period, followed by the two-minute-long “Driver-Controlled” period.

Students can begin competing in FIRST Tech Challenge in seventh grade and can continue to participate through high school, making it one of the more advanced programs that BadgerBOTS has.

For the most part, the older kids involved in BadgerBOTS choose to operate student-led teams, meaning that they make all the decisions that will be vital to the team’s success on the day of the competitions, according to Taylor. Mentors, which can be parents, teachers, or other adults from the Madison area, generally help with community outreach efforts, grant writing, and budget analysis.

Grant writing has paid off well for the program, according to Taylor. For example, Team 1306, a group of sophomores and juniors, used funds provided by NASA to form a yearlong project in which the squad built a near space balloon—a blimp that the students used to collect weather data from the upper atmosphere. The project was, for the most part, successful: the launch went on without an issue, but the balloon was lost for a while.

“A farmer found it in a field,” Taylor laughed. “They got it back and were able to retrieve the data.”

In addition to pursuing their own goals, the teens participating in BadgerBOTS also partner with the FIRST LEGO League a program that takes place in the fall and involves third through eighth grade students. The kids participating research real-world issues like energy or food safety, and then come up with solutions for the issue.

In 2015, the First LEGO League project was devoted to a messy topic: trash cleanup. The students were given a piece of trash and then tasked with finding out where it would typically end up, according to Taylor.

The younger kids participating in FLL use ‘LEGO Mindstorms,’ a technology that finds a good balance of simple LEGO enjoyment and the use of robots. Taylor says students take basic LEGO building practices and incorporate more advanced activities like changing gears and creating machinelike structures like lift arms. She adds that FLL is one of her favorite programs because it combines engineering and computer science practices with research and creative thinking.

It’s no secret that kids gain and lose interest in activities all the time. One year they might be attracted to space travel, and the next they’ll have an affinity for photography. The fluidity of a kid’s mind impacts BadgerBOTS too, as the retention rate for its one-year programs are less than outstanding. Knowing this, Taylor and other BadgerBOTS volunteers want to make sure students gain valuable life lessons that expand far beyond a time period that will end up being just a small blip in their life.

“We try to make it something that’s fun. Where kids can really take what they want out of it. Like LEGO League, I’d say that at least 40 percent of the kids go another year, but there are other demands on kids’ time so the retention rate isn’t crazy,” she says. “I think it’s more important that kids get exposure to it and figure out that it’s not something that’s too hard or out of their reach, or only for ‘nerdy, smart kids.’ That they can actually try programming, that they can build a robot that drives around and accomplishes things. That’s something that they might have not tried otherwise.”

BadgerBOTS, like many other STEM-oriented programs, receives less interest from girls than it does from boys. Taylor thinks girls tend to steer less toward STEM fields then boys because there is a perception that the field isn’t suited for women.

“I think that there is kind of an unconscious selection against doing something like this as a girl,” she says. “In my personal experience, I loved science, but I gravitated towards biology because maybe that was something to do as an adult woman. That changed my path.”

That perception could change as teachers and parents are increasingly pitching STEM to girls.

“I’ve had a lot of conversations with dads who say ‘I wish you could talk to my daughter and let her know programming is cool—she should try it out,’” Taylor says.

Whether it’s a boy or a girl, and whether that student wants to eventually enter the STEM field or not, BadgerBOTS simply teaches in a way that school cannot, helping a kids to become a more rounded academically.

“It’s a way of thinking that a lot of kids don’t get in school I think,” Taylor says. “A lot of school is read, listen, memorize, regurgitate, and with this they get to be creative and challenge themselves and kind of show off a little bit.”