Dancing in a Tutu: Using a Ballet Robot to Encourage Young Girls into Robotics

Despite recent initiatives, the number of women in programming and software engineering has continued to drop over recent years. One potential reason for this drop is that girls “learn” early on that programming is a boys’ activity and that they are not good at it. Therefore, they are less likely to choose topics relating to programming as they progress through their studies. Thus, one approach to increasing women in programming is to target girls at an early age and show them that programming is both doable and fun. This paper presents a pilot study involving a robotic programming system for girls aged five to ten. The children used a tangible-based programming system to program ballet dances on a Nao robot in a real-world classroom. The results indicate that the participants enjoyed the system and could build programs without many issues. While this study only includes a small data set, it does validate the overall idea and suggests that further research in the area is beneficial.