During the offseason, Girls of Steel worked to reorganize the structure of the business and tech subteams.  Read more about it here.  We are working hard to adapt to the challenge of adjusting to all-virtual preseason meetings.  Each subteam is still hard at work, and has found ways to adapt to all the changes this year.  Here is a quick summary of what each business and technical subteam is accomplishing so far this preseason.

Business Subteams

Advocacy:
Advocacy is a new subteam this year! Subteam members have been working on planning a team-wide Kahoot activity to introduce the team to advocacy and government and drafting a proposal for a new FIRST award to encourage other teams to engage in advocacy. We’ve also reached out to Carnegie Mellon University’s head of government relations and are planning different speakers for the team! Since we’re a new subteam we haven’t really had to adapt to anything, but we’ve been taking full advantage of the time we have over Zoom to make progress on all of our initiatives! We also reviewed the “Building Blocks of STEM Act” that was passed and signed into law in December 2019.  It was passed in the Senate by a voice vote (meaning there was bipartisan support and general consensus on it), then passed by the House, and was signed into law by the President. It’s a pretty neat bill that specifically calls out supporting young girls in STEM.    We’re a really small subteam with only 4 members: Anna N. Lead, and Natalie, Susanna, and Eve., so it’s been a real team effort to get everything done.

Awards:
Awards has dedicated all our energy to the writing aspect of the Chairman’s Award submission, which will focus on how we build and support communities. Luckily, the writing process has been easy to adapt to the virtual environment. One thing we struggled with at first was creating natural discussions over Zoom. We overcame that, however, as girls got to know each other better and we now go into every meeting with a clear idea of what needs to be discussed as well. Our subteam lead in Gigi and our members are: Alex, Amanda, Anuva, Ashley, and Teadora.  We work closely with the Image and Visual Subteams, too.

Media Communications:

For communications not much has changed for virtual meetings since most of what we do is based online. Our goals are to increase engagement with our posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and improve and increase our general online presence.  Some new initiatives this year include a meme contest and our weekly Women in STEM Series highlighting significant women in STEM. So far we have highlighted Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin.  Coming up next is… Our subteam lead is Justine and members are Anna S., Elizabeth, Maddy, and Tara.

DEI:

This is the second year for our DEI subteam and we’re ready to make an even bigger impact on Girls of Steel.   DEI for this preseason we have been coming up with big/little events and team bonding events so everyone feels included. We also have come up with ways to make everyone feel comfortable and fair on the team by listening to what the girls have to say and through the Suggestion Box. Just recently we have been working on a diversity project where we want to reach out to underrepresented communities in Pittsburgh and do virtual outreach events with them. We have adapted to all-virtual meetings pretty well, and so far there are no issues. Our co-leads are Diya and Lauren, and our subteam members are Ella and Qingqing.

Finance:
We’ve been working on adapting our budget for the season and all the crazy changes that came with it. We’re also working on our fundraising strategy and how we can shift that for an online setting where communication is really tough. We’re also rewriting our business plan as a whole sub team. Also for our annual donations to a local nonprofit, we are coordinating some details for collection, such as making arrangements for contact-free drop off of donations at team members’ homes. Overall having everything online is super interesting because we’ve adopted a more work at your own pace style in which we give assignments and review them the next week, which is pretty different to how it was run before. Also just in general there are a lot of unknown factors related to revenue and expenses that we have to account for in finance since nothing is really set in stone for the team or the season. Our co-leads are Aditi and Aditri and our subteam members are Ashnaa, Gloria, Grace, Sreyashi, and Vivian.  If you’re reading this and want to make a donation to our team, please check out the donate page on our website!

FIRST Ladies:

This is our second year directing FIRST Ladies.  We’ve been using ideas from the end of last season and trying to increase communication between regional partners. New this year: we are now a Girls of Steel subteam.  As a first year sub-team we are starting from scratch and trying to communicate and delegate projects in the best way possible. Our co-leads are Aeryn and Samhita and subteam members are Abby MP, Bess, and Swathi.

FIRST LEGO League:  

The FIRST LEGO League subteam is another new subteam this year.  We have reorganized our FLL efforts such that all the preparations for the weekly FLL meetings occurs during weekly All-Hands meetings. The FLL subteam members are the FLL mentors so they discuss how the previous FLL meeting went and work on creating a general outline of the upcoming FLL meeting activities. Tuesday meetings have gone very smoothly virtually. As for our weekly FLL meetings with 4 teams and 37 kids, we’ve been working on how to make FLL more interactive despite being on Zoom. Check out the first FLL blogpost here.   The teams are currently working on creating their own website for their project solutions using Google Sites and we mailed supplies for a Halloween activity mailing supplies to families. In addition, we also purchased and mailed RePLAY mission models to all the students so that each member received at least one mission model. Our co-leads are Janise and Justina and our subteam members are Ananya, Ariella, Elise, Megan. In addition to our subteam members as FLL mentors, we have had Lauren, Dusty, Hannah, and Aria join us at FLL meetings.

Media Image: 
This preseason, image has been working on several projects. We are making mask designs and helping Awards Team with the outreach booklet. We are helping Finance with a sponsor quick-facts sheet. We also made multiple social media templates for communication. Though all-virtual was bumpy at the start, we’ve adapted and maintain our collaborative mindset by sharing screens to get feedback on projects, sharing our progress on Discord between meetings, and working together editing our graphics. Our lead is Abbey M. and subteam members are Ariana, Ciara, Harshi, and Meghna.

Outreach:
Outreach has been focusing on developing partnerships with other companies, updating the outreach impact doc, and improving the champion system by clarifying responsibilities of the champion.  We’ve adapted to these virtual meetings with 15 minute check-ins after all hands just to see where everyone is and hand out new assignments for the week. Our co-leads are Emma and Norah, and subteam members are Maggie and Somdatta, the FTC Liaisons, Prishti, and Tilee.

Media Visual:
In usual years the Visual subteam would be responsible for capturing various outreach events and meetings, with everything online we’ve turned out efforts into sorting through the existing photo library and transferring it to Google photos. We are also hard at work scripting and creating videos for Girls of Steel to share. With a smaller subteam, we’ve found that team bonding and the beginning of meetings has been essential! Aria is our lead and subteam members are Anna F., Rishika, Mia, and Kameron.

Technical Subteams

Design:

This preseason, Design decided to really hone in on our skills by making several smaller projects with small groups. We are keeping design notebooks every meeting to keep good documentation. The girls are making gearboxes, chassis and shooters. We are using Onshape this year instead of Solidworks due to the ease of access, since it is online. Though we can’t meet in person, the girls on the sub-team have still grown very close, through partnering on projects and chatting during meetings. Our co-leads are Abbey M., Abby MP, Alex, Aeryn, and Elizabeth, and our subteam members are Ananya, Justine, Maya, Harshi, Aditi, Rishika, Diya, Aria, and Somdatta.

Electrical:
This year, the electrical team has adapted to having a teaching-based preseason. A teaching-based presentation is both well-suited for a virtual year as well as is inline with fixing a growing knowledge gap within the subteam. The teaching-based preseason is structured such that each week there is a slideshow on an aspect of electrical (ex: wiring, sensors, pneumatics) and is accompanied by a supplemental project or test. Projects including making diagrams, doing research, and CAD-ing. One major change that occurred over the electrical team’s summer restructure is that electrical members are responsible for CAD-ing the e-board rather than the design team, thus CAD was added to the electrical curriculum. Overall, the learning curve has been somewhat steep because electrical work has always been more hands-on, but we learning things and digging far deeper into FRC electronics as well electrical engineering in general than we have in past years! Our lead is Aditri and our subteam members are Ariana, Gigi, Lauren, Kameron, Ashnaa, Anuva, Prishti, and Bess.

Mechanical: 

Mechanical has been focused on teaching theory and some more design to adjust to the virtual setting. After covering the basics of CAD, gearboxes, and some basic skills; we started our first project. We practiced fabricating from design by building catapults out of cardboard at home. This project was chosen because we wanted to get into more engaging, hands on activities during meetings, and actually build a mechanism like we do in person during our season. Catapults made sense to start with because they can be built without motors or any electronics but still relate to FRC robotics. We are now nearing the end of this project and are planning to do a design review, then start another similar at home project to build a different mechanism.  Our co-leads are Elizabeth, Eve, Norah, Teadora, and Tilee and our subteam members are Gloria, Susanna, Tara, Justina, Maggie, Natalie, Elise, Samhita, Mia, Ella, Maddy, Amanda. Megan, Ciara. Anna F., Qingqing, and Swathi.

Programming:
Programming just started our pre-season project, which is writing code for the outreach robot. We are writing code on our own laptops, and then plan to test it using a simulation of the outreach robot. The simulation will allow us to to test movement of motors, accuracy of sensors, etc. We will use this to test the accuracy of our code without actually having the physical robot to test it with. Our co-leads are Meghna, Janise, and Emma and subteam members are Anna N., Anna S., Ariella, Ashley, Grace, Sreyashi, and Vivian.