The Girls of Steel sub teams are working through a rigorous preseason and are actively completing their goals! Beginning with business, the finance team updated the sponsor letter and the business plan. Deciding which expenses this year’s crowdfunding fundraiser will cover went from robot parts to travel, at least in part. They thoroughly discussed this year’s budget and brainstormed fundraising, expenses, and presenting budget ideas to the whole team.
The Inclusion team organized the Girls of Steel diversity data and compared it to the data of Allegheny County. They also had an essential discussion on strategies to improve diversity on the team! Girls filled out an inclusion survey, and the inclusion subteam has began to organize statistics and talk about solutions and results. We started our Big & Little Sisters program this year to promote inclusion on the team – pairing an experienced girl with a new girl for team bonding and other fun activities.
The media team worked on branding guidelines, t-shirt designs, website updates, and social media posts. One of the media team members wrote a blog post about a recent guest speaker, Leanne Meyer, we met on October 1st. The Rookie First Tumblr blog post was another task completed by media, which included interviews of FRC girls. Media learned that the advice of the older team members is to further introduce new girls to the important skills needed for build season.
A recent change on the team is our mission statement, updated here:
The awards team picked a theme for the chairman’s essay, “always improve”. This topic is meaningful as it pushes the Girls of Steel, members and team as a whole, to never stop our pursuit to greatness. For the long and short essays, the girls were divided into groups and overviewed judging prep for competition.
The video team interviewed Girls of Steel alumnae and scripted for the crowdfunding video, as well as reached out to the rest of the team for girls to participate in it! Check our website for updates on the 2019 Crowdfunding campaign starting on Monday, November 4th!
The girls have also been busy with preseason on the technical side of the team! Girls were assigned to technical subteams, and settled into their new positions. Here’s what all the subteams did: programming went through a presentation with our mentor, Joe, to introduce new girls to java coding. Design went through CAD tutorials with mentors and experienced team members. Electronics discussed and disassembled an old e-board. Mechanical began to learn skills for end of preseason projects.
Each subteam is starting EOPP’s which stands for “end of preseason projects”. The programming team began working on their EOPP, which is rewriting code from last year to use during build season, and coding a limelight for this year’s robot. Design is looking at an old game and creating a robot design on CAD for their EOPP. Mechanical is making incredible progress on their multiple EOPPs, and they are almost finished with a new chassis project with a camera attachment.
Lastly, FTC girls have made tremendous headway on their robots! The chassis are the base of the robots, and the girls continue to add to them and create designs to make each team unique. As well as building the chassis, FTC teams are designing, building attachments, and writing blog posts as well as presentation slides. FTC and FRC girls have been working extremely hard these past weeks, and we’ll end up with amazing EOPP’s and robots!
Finally, we were excited that Alyssa Silver of American Eagle Outfitters came to a recent all hands meeting. She talked to us about the pathway to her career in tech and we thanked her and American Eagle for sponsoring the Girls of Steel plaids for 10 seasons!
