When you combine competitive sport with hands-on coding, something clicks. We saw it first-hand at the Premier League Primary Stars National Girls Regional Qualifier, held at the Hawthorns — home of West Bromwich Albion. Ten local girls’ football teams competed on the pitch, and between matches, each team joined us for a robotics session. The result was one of the most engaged groups of young people we’ve worked with all year.
What Happened on the Day
The format was straightforward: while teams waited for their next match, they came to our area and programmed sports robots. The challenge was to code the robots to score goals, with students assigning different football positions through their programming. It’s a brilliant hook because the children already understand the context — they know what a striker does, they know what a goalkeeper does — and translating that into code makes the abstract suddenly concrete.
Watching a group of 9-year-olds argue about whether their robot’s turning angle was right (it wasn’t, and they fixed it themselves) reminded us why this approach works. The football gave them a reason to care about the code.
Why This Matters for Girls in STEM
Let’s be honest: getting girls engaged in computing and engineering is still a challenge in most schools. The statistics haven’t shifted as much as we’d like. But what we see consistently is that context makes the difference. When coding is presented as an abstract, screen-based activity, plenty of children switch off — and girls disproportionately so. When it’s tied to something physical, competitive, and social, the engagement transforms.
Students from Wolves FC, Aston Villa, and Birmingham City all told us they’d never done anything like it before and that the coding was genuinely fun. That matters. First impressions of computing stick with children for years.
Sport as a Gateway to STEM
This event reinforced something we’ve seen across our corporate STEM programmes: sport is an incredibly effective gateway to technology education. The competitive element, the teamwork, the immediate feedback of seeing your robot do (or not do) what you intended — it all works.
Our Beginner STEMbotics workshops use similar principles in the classroom, combining physical robots with challenges that give coding a purpose beyond the screen. If you’re looking for ways to broaden STEM engagement in your school, especially among pupils who think computing “isn’t for them”, get in touch. We’ve got ideas.
