Bethpage senior earns prestigious Girl Scout Gold Award for creating free robotics program

Bethpage High School senior Anjali Ponugupati has earned Girl Scouting’s highest honor — the Girl Scout Gold Award — for a robotics program she built to give younger students free access to STEM education.

The Gold Award goes to senior and ambassador Girl Scouts who identify a problem in their community, examine what’s causing it, and build a solution that can outlast their own involvement. Recipients are required to serve at least 80 leadership hours on a single sustainable project.

Ponugupati joined Girl Scouts as a third grader at Charles Campagne School and has stuck with the same troop for nearly a decade. She’s the first in that group to reach Gold. Though she noted that her milestone has motivated others.

For her project, Ponugupati designed and ran a six-session robotics program for elementary and middle schoolers at the Bethpage Public Library, using LEGO robotics kits and iPads to cover electrical engineering, programming, problem-solving and teamwork.

“The first day was introducing the kids to what robotics is, and then as the classes went on, I taught them about electrical engineering, programming and working together as a team,” she said. “Each session was meant to be an hour, but eventually the kids were so into it, they ended up lasting two hours.”

One student stood out. With two minutes left in a session, a girl hadn’t finished her robot — and simply wasn’t willing to leave it unfinished.

“She hadn’t finished her robot, and there were only two minutes left in class,” Ponugupati remembered. “She said, ‘I have to continue this.’ She went to her mom and said, ‘I don’t care what happens, I’ll pay her if I have to. I’m staying here.'”

But she understands that not every student nearby the same level of access that she has. Outside STEM programs can run families hundreds of dollars — a barrier she wanted her own project to eliminate.

“My overall goal was to make my program free of cost completely,” Ponugupati said, “and to introduce kids to the fun part of STEM.”

Ponugupati worked with her Regal Eagles teammates and Bethpage High School advisers to keep the workshops going past her own graduation. The team has committed to running similar sessions as part of its ongoing community service work.

She also measured the impact of the initiative by surveying participants before and after program.

“Because they were primarily elementary-age kids, their first survey responses were mostly ‘I don’t know,’ ‘Maybe,’ ‘This is cool,’ things like that,” she said. “By the end of the program, though, they were giving full paragraph answers explaining that they had learned so many things.

“Some kids went out of their way to list all the things they had learned,” Ponugupati added.

In the final session, she gave students an open-ended challenge: design and build something of their own using what they had learned.

“They went beyond what I was thinking they would,” she said.

Ponugupati received her Gold Award earlier this summer at a ceremony hosted by Girl Scouts of Nassau County. She also received recognition from local and state officials and a certificate from the White House.

She’s heading into senior year at Bethpage with an eye on college and a focus on biomedical engineering, specifically regenerative medicine technology. As far as college goes, Georgia Tech tops her list, partly because her brother went there.

“I love the campus and their life there,” she said. “They have the best program for what I want to go into. That’s my dream.”

_{Photos courtesy of Bethpage Union Free School District.}