A Canada.com article says robot building and robot contests are drawing more girls into science-related fields by giving them confidence in their technical skills. The article describes the UVic Lego Robotics Festival for Girls which is designed to introduce girls in grades 6 through 12 to engineering and science. Teams of girls build robots and each team members gets experience with both programming and hardware assembly. They're shown practical examples of why they need to learn math. And they learn problem solving skills. So far it seems to be working. After building a robot, many of the girls have gone from a dislike of math and science to a desire to enter a science or engineering field.