The theme for this year’s Robogals Science Challenge is community. Your challenge is to come up with a creation to benefit your community and implement it (or a prototype of it). This can be done by:
Firstly, think of how you define your community. It can be your school, neighbourhood, suburb, city, country or the world. Next, think of what you’d like to introduce to your community that will benefit them. The key here is to think creatively, and maybe start with the sentence “It’d be cool to have a … that can do …” Alternatively, you can look for something that could be improved in your community; it could be a problem with traffic congestion, using too much pesticides/fertilisers in our garden, an ineffective reminder system and so on. Once you’ve got a few ideas bumping around in your head, it’s time to move to the next step.
Among the ideas you’ve thought up, you get to choose one that you would like to work on. You can implement a smaller, demo version of it or implement it full scale in your community. For example, the winner for the senior age group last year made a lego version of her robotic solution for paraplegic movements. Also, you can choose to implement ideas with regards to the wider community for a period of time to test if it works. An example of that might be a solution for traffic congestion that you’d like to try out in your neighbourhood, implement it for a day with the blessing of your local council as part of your project.
Not sure where to start? Here are a few different fields of engineering. It's easier to choose a project idea once you've determined what field interests you.