Spelman College Robotics Team Atlanta Daily World
The women from the Spelman college Robotics team will represent their school in Japan July 13-19.
1. Visit the Spelman College Web Site>http://www.spelman.edu
In the coming weeks, Spelman College students will establish a new reputation for the Atlanta women’s college already recognized for its competitive liberal arts program: science and technology.
Aryen Moore-Alston, Brandy Kinlaw, Karina Liles, Shinese Noble, Ebony O’Neal, and Ebony Smith, all students at Spelman, will make history when they compete in RoboCup 2005 in Osaka, Japan July 13-19. The young women will be accompanied by their faculty advisor, Dr. Andrew Williams. Artificial intelligence is one of Williams’ research specialties and it was his idea to put together a robotics team at Spelman. Spelman is the only historically black college or university, the only women’s college, and the only four-year college chosen to participate in the event. The students and their mentor are determined that this will not be their first and last visit to the competition. They hope that their team, SpelBots, will continue after they graduate and that other women will be encouraged to enter the computer science and engineering fields.
The RoboCup competition will bring in 280 teams from all over the world. According to its organizers, RoboCup is meant to “foster Artificial Intelligence and Robotics research” by having students build robots that can play a game of soccer without remote controls. The building of the robots requires teams to meet a number of challenges, including writing computer programs that incorporate several technologies. The robots must not only be able to act out the physical aspects of a soccer game, but also make strategic decisions about how to win the game. The ability to build such robots has serious implications, since they could eventually be used to serve in disaster rescue situations.
Established by black and white Baptists in 1881 to educate young African-American women, Spelman College has a history of training women of color to not only enter the occupations that society deems appropriate, but to open up new avenues for black women. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Spelman Seminary (it did not become a college until 1924) primarily educated black women to become nurses, teachers, and missionaries. As more occupational opportunities opened up after World Wars I and II, Spelman women entered new fields of study, blazing the way for black women to come.
Spelman College is continuing this tradition in the 21st century. Over the last quarter of a century, Spelman has become a leader in training African-American women in the sciences. At the college for black women, approximately one-third of the students major in science, engineering and math. Despite the fact that women now attend college in numbers equal to men (and now in higher numbers), they are still vastly under-represented in the sciences. Thus, Spelman, with its low faculty-student ratio and nurturing environment, is proving to be an important training ground for increasing the number of women in the sciences. With a small student population of just over 2100, Spelman ranks second in the nation in sending African-American students to medical school.
Although the SpelBots have only been working on robotics for about a year, Spelman’s strides in the sciences did not take place overnight. Over the last 25 years, the college has been carving out a niche in educating women scientists, mathematicians and engineers. For years, the school has held a summer science program for pre-freshmen. The program helps to acclimate high school students to the strenuous study associated with math, science and engineering so that they are not overwhelmed their first semester. Spelman has received grants from NASA as well as from the National Institutes of Health that have helped make their efforts to train women scientists a reality. In addition, there has been a persistent dedication on the part of the faculty to see students do the type of research that will prepare them for graduate school.
The selection of a Spelman team to participate in the RoboCup competition illustrates just how much our HBCU students can do if and when they are supported.
*About the Author Stephanie Wright is an assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia. She can be reached at lilac670@yahoo.co
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Thursday, June 30th 2005 at 10:12AM
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