ROSE-HULMAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

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1 Page 1 ROSE-HULMAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING November 14, 2016 To the reviewers for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, I endorse Haley for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing with the highest possible enthusiasm. I have worked with middle and high school students in robotics activities and competitions for the past 18 years. Of all the girls with whom I have worked over the past 18 years, Haley is the best candidate for the NCWIT Award. I make that claim for two reasons: First, Haley has the qualities and attitude that will make her a terrific software engineer. Second, Haley genuinely wants to change the world for the better. Here is evidence that shows that Haley has the qualities and attitude that will make her a terrific software engineer. Haley has a wonderful sense of curiosity. I know Haley because she has participated in a robotics competition called Botball ( that I have coached/mentored for many years. Haley began participating when she was a 7 th grader, in the spring of 2013, in the inaugural year of our all-girls Botball team. From the very beginning, Haley demonstrated curiosity about, well, just about everything. She and her father chose to attend the Teacher s Workshop that kicks off the season, in order to learn as much about the robots and their programming as possible. She has returned each year since then, in order to learn more each time. Additionally, she has attended (with her family) the Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER) that includes the International Botball Competition for which her team qualified. That conference features talks by renowned roboticists, educators, and students. I believe that she has attended ALL of the featured talks, along with many of the talks in the various tracks. I asked her what was one of her favorite talks and she mentioned three:

2 Page 2 o The members of the Dead Robot Society (one of the Botball teams) gave at talk on Simultaneous Location and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms. o Dr. Akhil Madhani, head of research and development of robotic animation for use in Walt Disney Parks and Resorts worldwide, gave a talk about the animatronics for which he was responsible. o Helen Greiner, the co-founder of irobot (maker of robotic vacuum cleaners and more) gave a talk on her work past, present, and (a bit of) future. Haley was especially taken by the part of Ms. Greiner s talk in which she showed a robotic baby doll that was amazing, but ahead of its time. I feel sure that Haley will look to creating such a doll sometime in her career, perhaps as a therapeutic toy (see her career aspirations, below). She has attended ALL of the workshops offered at GCER, on programming a microprocessor (an Arduino); programming robots to display emotion; and underwater robotics! Haley has terrific perseverance. She is not deterred by difficult problems. For example, the 2014 contest featured orange poof balls on top of towers. The robot scored points by (among other things) reaching up to grab the poof ball and taking it to another place on the game board all autonomously, no remote controls! Haley learned how to use the robot s camera to locate the orange poof ball. Two challenges that she did not expect, and took perseverance to overcome, were that the camera needed to be mounted upside down (complicating the coding and debugging) and that the upwardpointing camera found the bright lighting at the contest much more difficult to deal with than the lighting at our practice board. Haley is extremely intelligent. This shows in her grades, her admission to the National Honor Society, and more. I am especially impressed by the quality of our discussions I am a Professor of Computer Science and hence good at explaining challenging ideas in simple ways, but it is nonetheless quite impressive that we are beginning to discuss PID control and its application to the Botball robots! At each of the GCER s that she has attended, she presented a project that she did. These were a dancing robot (using an irobot Create robot programmed in Python), an Animatronic Tiger (more on that below), a Romo robot programmed in Objective C, and a 3d printer that she put together (with her dad) from a kit. She had plenty of help from me in all of these (except the Tiger, which she did completely on her own), but the fact that she could do such a diverse set of software/hardware projects shows that she is extremely intelligent. Haley works well with others. She has been co-captain of the all-girls Ada Lovelace Team from the Wabash Valley in each of her 4 years of Botball. I loved watching Haley help Alanta, a new teammate, become comfortable with the team and Botball. When her all-girls team met the all-boys team in the finals of the Regional contest, she joined

3 Page 3 in the fun and excitement as our teams faced off against each other, congratulating the boys when they won. Last summer, the boys team had only 1 team member who was able to go to GCER and compete in the International Botball Competition, so she invited him to join her team. One of the several Botball competitions is called the Alliance matches. In this part of the competition, each team knocked out of the double-elimination tournament in the first 4 rounds are paired (randomly) with another team that was knocked out, and the two teams combine their efforts and robots to try for a high score. I especially remember Haley in the GCER Alliance competition in New Mexico. There, her team was paired with a rookie team from Taos that had a single member at the International Competition. She spent all of her time working to prepare for the Alliance matches by working with the other team s sole member, helping him to get his team s robot to work. Haley is an excellent communicator. She has done the technical presentation to the judges at each of her 4 Regional and 4 International Botball contests. I remember how very, very nervous she was at the first one, and I have delighted to watch her grow both in her comfort and proficiency in doing those technical presentations. She and her friend Jaia did a tremendous job in the most recent presentations, supporting each other seamlessly where most students have a hard time not interrupting each other. She and Jaia also took the lead in a video that her team made for the inaugural White House Student Film Festival on STEM education. Their video is titled The Power of Botball and is way-cool you can see it yourself at Haley is very creative. The above examples demonstrate that creativity amply, but here is one more example the Animatronic Tiger that she built and programmed for presentation at GCER in She took a favorite stuffed toy tiger, put an Arduino in it (having learned how to program an Arduino at the previous summer s GCER workshop), added motors that moved the tiger s head, and then programmed the Arduino so that the Animatronic Tiger made all sorts of expressive movements. She did all of the programming and working with hardware completely on her own! After each contest, Haley is eager to post-mortem, learn how to do things better, and refactor her code. These are critical skills for a software engineer; it is wonderful that she gravitates to them so naturally, so early in her career. She grabs every opportunity to improve her programming skills. For example, last spring one of her teachers mentioned a 2-day summer workshop on programming in Java; Haley immediately signed up for it (and learned a lot from it when she attended later in the summer). Another example: her high-school does not have anyone capable of teaching software development, so she went to where she has completed modules on programming in Python and in Java. Haley is able to balance pragmatism and perfection. Russel Simmons, former CTO and co-founder of Yelp, lists this as one of the 10 most important qualities to look for when

4 Page 4 hiring software engineers ( At one of the Regional contests, her team won a Judge s Choice award for Best Engineering Design (for a robot that had to remove clothes hangers from a rod a surprisingly difficult task!). At the 2015 International Botball Competition, her team won the KISS award for a robot that was a perfect example of balancing pragmatism and perfection. Their robot was a very simple scooper-robot made from Legos that was very successful, because of its simplicity, in moving the poms from their starting place on the game board to the place on the side of the board where they scored points. All of the above provides evidence for the first reason why Haley is so deserving of the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing that she has the qualities and attitude that will make her a terrific software engineer. Now, here is evidence for the second reason why: Haley genuinely wants to change the world for the better. In Haley s application for the NCWIT Award, she talks about her older sister: One thing that I would really like to accomplish in life is to be able to use robotics and programming to help create medical devices that will make life for handicapped children easier. My older sister was born with Cerebral Palsy. She was unable to speak or walk without assistance. It was very frustrating for her to be able to communicate to me what she needed. I would like to help create things that would help kids like my sister be able to communicate their wants and needs. I think that computing devices would have made her life easier. I would also like to help create devices that would aide in mobility or therapy for handicapped children. I knew that Haley had an older sister who died, but I did not know anything about the sister before reading the above it was too painful a subject for her parents to talk with me about. But I can attest that her statement above is heartfelt. She really does want to create things that would help kids like my sister be able to communicate their needs and wants. She volunteers at the Terre Haute Children s Museum. When a group of 8-year-olds wanted to form a Junior Botball team, she helped teach them how to program. This December she will participate as a student assistant in the Hour of Code workshops that colleagues and I are giving. Haley is the only high school student whom I invited to be a student assistant I did so because I know that Haley s heartfelt interests in helping others will make her a wonderful assistant. Since this is a letter of endorsement, I will continue by briefly commenting on and reinforcing the statements she makes in her application: Under What have you done with computing and technology?, she writes: I have written various programs for my Botball robotics team. Botball is an autonomous robotics competition for middle and high school students. I am the lead programmer for my

5 Page 5 team. I have written code libraries to make functions easier to use for the beginning programmers on our Botball robotics team. I am using the C programming language. I have attended and competed in GCER (the global conference on educational robotics) for the past four years. I have made games using programs like Alice and Gamemaker. I have built a 3D printer that uses an Arduino as its controller. I have also used an Arduino to make LED Christmas lights blink in patterns. I have written IOS apps to work with a Romo robot. I have used Python language to program a robot using an icreate Rumba base to be a dancing robot. I have used Notepad++ and HTML to create simple websites. I have built and programmed an animatronic tiger using Lego's and Erector Set pieces. I have supervised all her work in Botball, so I can attest directly to the effort and excellence of the programs that she has written for Botball, including simple code libraries, and to the applications that she has presented at GCERs (3d printer; IOS app for a Romo robot; programming a dancing robot in Python; and the Animatronic Tiger using Legos and Erector Set pieces). Under Interest in Computing and Technology, I am the professor whom she mentions, and can attest directly to everything that she says there, including I attended a Botball meeting and I have been hooked ever since. Under Leadership, she describes her work as team captain and leader of the all-girls Botball team. She is indeed THE leader of the team, although she prefers to be a co-captain because she realizes that one aspect of leadership is sharing power. She has grown from a hesitant cocaptain as a 7th grader, to a confident, knowledgeable leader and co-captain as a rising 11th grader. When she says I show them [junior members of the Botball teams] the fun of robotics, but also try to teach them the importance of teamwork, she truly means it, because she has experienced the importance of teamwork through her all-girls Botball team. I have already spoken to her heartfelt desire to create things that would help kids like my sister, as she expresses in her section on Career Goals. In the Problem to solve using technology, she describes the next step of her intellectual development in robotics and software development using PID control to help the robot go straight. You can tell from the clarity of her description (which I had nothing to do with) that she has an excellent grasp of the problem and the direction that she will take to solve it. In sum: I can attest directly (as an active participant) to the accuracy of almost all of what Haley writes in her application. I endorse Haley for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing with the highest possible enthusiasm. I do so because: First, Haley has the qualities and attitude that will make her a terrific software engineer. Second, Haley genuinely wants to change the world for the better.

6 Page 6 I have worked with middle and high school students in robotics activities and competitions for the past 18 years. Of all the girls with whom I have worked over the past 18 years, Haley is the best candidate for the NCWIT Award. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like any further information from me. Sincerely, David Mutchler Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology mutchler@rose-hulman.edu Phone: (812)