At the same time, as the girls are working in their teams, they are also using what they're doing in their classrooms. One of my favourite stories is about girls struggling with trigonometry working ahead of a team meeting. They went off to look at the ramp the robot had to roll up. They looked at each other after figuring out what the angle was and said, “We're using trig.” It really gave them a hands-on, real-world experience to take what they were learning in their classrooms and transfer it into a real-world learning opportunity. You have no idea of the confidence that will give young women.
There's another piece we're seeing when we look at the numbers. Our teams with the younger students tend to be made up of boys and girls fifty-fifty. Sadly, as they get older, that number drops across the country. I'm very happy to report that our statistics are better than those in the United States. We're seeing about 35% to 65% of girls carrying on. In the U.S., it's about 72% boys and the other smaller percentage is girls, so we're doing something right up here.
The other thing that's really exciting about STEM is that the girls who are involved in FIRST Robotics have a hands-on experience with it that they really take forward. As we look at our graduation rates—and I surveyed the other girls' teams—we see that about 87% to 90% of the girls who have been involved in a FIRST Robotics program go on to study the hard-core STEM subjects at university, so we know it's working. The other tremendously powerful thing in this is that through these clubs and teams they have met with women who are mentors and who are practising engineers, and they really have a tremendous network and resource.
The other thing that I believe this does for us is that it's shifting a change in opinions of boys and men around what it is that girls are able to do. They are seen as equal partners on teams when, as Karen said, they're an equal voice at the table. The boys look at them differently and understand that they really do have an excellent grasp of what science, math, engineering, and technology are, and they can do anything with that.