When I started Robogals, I thought going to schools and teaching girls robotics should get more to choose physics, chemistry and advanced maths; then in turn engineering at a tertiary level.

After running Robogals for two years, I realised that I never would have been a beneficiary of a program like Robogals, being from Cairns, a remote regional city that was 2.5 hours by plane from the nearest city of over 1 million residents.  I realised city kids have a plethora of extra-curricula choices, whereas rural and regional kids hardly have any.

So I started the Robogals Rural and Regional programme, where our chapters pack up a car full of volunteers, robots and laptops; go to a rural and regional area, and teach as many girls as they can in a week.

After running that for half a year, I realised that we were still not reaching kids in my hometown of Cairns, and that it would be very costly for us to do so.  So I started the Robogals Science Challenge, where kids from all over the country could do a science experiment at home with a mentor, film a 4-minute video and submit it online to win some great prizes.  We had some Cairns girls enter that.

Six months later, I travelled for 6 weeks visiting 15 organisations in 4 countries to find strategies for getting girls into engineering, and I found even more ideas for tackling the lack of girls in engineering issue.

Your work is never done.  There's always more to do and more to learn.  But you start by taking the first step, and continue by learning along the way.