Girls in the Shop

Overview

Girls in the Shop is an outreach event KnightKrawlers hosts yearly in our shop around early September. The event is open to any female or nonbinary identifying students from 8th grade and up, and provides a safe space for students to learn how to use shop tools and build custom, fully functional bird houses.

The event happens in early September (this year, September 8) in the late evening, around our regular meeting time. The event happens soon after the start of the school year in the hopes of bringing in more interested high school students of this underrepresented identity in to join the team through a welcoming and tolerant environment for growth.

How do we prepare?

In the past, our mentor Scott has taken the lead on organizing and preparing materials needed for Girls in the Shop. This usually takes about a full day of cutting parts. This past year, we worked well with about 30 kits. The main parts of the birdhouses include the opposing pointed sides, the slanted roof, and the rectangular spacers to create air and water release holes at the bottom of the bird house.

Main parts

• 20 total kits (components above)
• 2 hammers
• Cups of nails
• 3 Drills
• Drill Bits
• Star Bits & Star Screws
• P2 bits
• Forstner Bits
• Phillips Screws

After all the parts are cut and laid out in Scott’s shop, a few people take responsibility for using primer to paint each part completely white in order to provide a flesh slate for students to decorate the bird houses as they please with markers or paint after initial construction.

How do we advertise?

For the 2025 Girls in the Shop Event, we focused mainly on in-person and digital advertisement.

In-person, we hung posters (including the one attached below) with the description of and information about the event and a photograph of last year’s session. Existing students and leadership were also encouraged to invite friends and classmates, from those who expressed interest in Robotics, Engineering, or Business, to those we believed may enjoy the opportunity to learn how to use shop tools in a safe environment.

Our digital advertisement methods included announcements through our preferred team communication software, Girls in the Shop, to encourage existing team members to attend and invite any friends and siblings who may be interested, as well as the inclusion of information posters in Community and School-level newsletters. Our media team also posted the information on our instagram and Facebook, where team members were able / encouraged to repost and share with their social media networks. Some leadership members also worked to identify middle school teachers or club advisors, such as the Innovation teacher at a local middle school, to whom we could send the information sheet and ask to promote the event to their previous or rising 8th graders.

At the event

At the event, students were first given safety glasses and a short tour through our shop space. Then, our mentor Scott walked attendees through the stations setup as prepared prior to the event, explaining which parts he had been able to pre-cut and which tools would be required at each station in order to put the entire bird house together, using a prebuilt birdhouse as a visual aide.

Afterwards, students began to split into the 4 main stations. At one station, students worked to attach the spacers to the bottom of their birdhouses with nails and a hammer. Then, students moved to a different station where they used hand drills and star bits to attach the sides and top of the birdhouse. At a different station students used a saw to cut their roof to the correct size. Finally, students went to the drill press station to create a hole in the front of their birdhouse before attaching it to the front of their structure along with the back.

At each major tool station (drill press and saw), we had a supervising adult. Other adults mingled through the rest of the stations, providing support where needed and allowing student leaders and new students to drive where needed.

Reflection on the 2025 Girls in the Shop Event

Students who attended the 2025 Girls in the Shop Event were from a wide variety of backgrounds, from interest in Robotics Engineering to interest in general building or design. A few students ended up joining the team during the Fall Season, but this year all students ended up having alternative commitments or scheduling overlaps that caused them to not continue their time on the team beyond October.

In the future, we are hoping to advertise more towards incoming freshmen, as many of our attendees were upperclassmen or sophomores. This way, more students may be willing to explore various Irondale activities and persist in attendance throughout the season. Many of our current students, particularly those who identify as women or non-binary, express wishing they had known about the team or their ability to participate on it earlier, so we may consider reframing our outreach efforts to snag more people from this group early on.

Some other suggestions for future Girls in the Shop Events are:

• “How to” informational drawings or images at each station
  • Will be particularly helpful as our attendance hopefully increases in size
• More effective outreach to middle schools
  • In-person outreach / contact with teachers and club advisors
  • Summer outreach events
• Include a section of the event where we talk specifically about what being on KnightKrawler looks like
• Integrate more female stem teacher involvement from Irondale
  • Asking specific female or nonbinary presenting STEM teachers at Irondale itself to attend and encourage more of their students to do the same
• Re-evaluate when the best time is to host the event
  • Option 1: right after school → less mentor support, possibly more attendance, might not have our space
  • Option 2: 6pm (what we chose) → more mentor availability, more similar to season meeting time
  • We chose the 6pm time, but may think more about the tradeoff with student availability in coming years to possibly boost student attendance

Media

Below is our 2025 Girls in the Shop Night poster created by our Media Captain, Mason, to hang at school and distribute through email and newsletters to the broader community.