The business and technical subteams had their final week of preseason the week of December 14th.  Despite the different circumstances this year, each subteam achieved many of their goals.  Here is a summary from every subteam on what they accomplished this preseason.  In case you missed it, here’s our first preseason blog post.

Business Subteams

After having restructured the business side of the team this summer, we were eager to test out the changes. We were pleased to confirm that the new system distributed tasks better and improved communication. All of the new subteams established themselves successfully and having smaller subteams really complimented our virtual circumstances. All in all, it was a great preseason!

Advocacy:

This preseason, Advocacy has worked to lay the groundwork for the rest of the year. We’ve drafted an award proposal to send to FIRST to encourage teams to get involved with Advocacy, met with Ms. Deb Tekavec (CMU’s Director of Federal Relations) to learn more about federal advocacy, and, since we’re a new subteam, introduced Advocacy to the team through an activity and presentation. Moving forward, we are looking to identify a bill to advocate for, connect with several female political leaders who will provide further guidance and speak to the team, and officially propose the Advocacy Award to FIRST!

Awards:

This season in Awards, we worked hard on writing and editing the Chairman’s essays. While they still need some touch ups before they are submitted in February 2021, we are very close to finishing and we learned a lot about teamwork, communication, and the writing process.  Some of our girls also worked on designing documents in Canva.

Media Communication:

We are going to continue our weekly series of social media posts on significant “Women in STEM.”  Also, we received a request for a poster version of one of the  “Women in STEM” posts, so we will design and share on our website soon.  We produced blog posts for general preseason activities as well as for the FIRST Ladies Game Night event, FLL.  A blog about our “Rosie Talks” webinar series will be published soon. In addition we updated and edited our website and started to track our media statistics to compare year-to-year.

DEI:

Throughout the preseason, we had successful big/little activities, planned team events such as the virtual holiday party, and we also grew inclusivity within the team. With diversity, we have reached out to the Center of Life in Hazelwood, PA and hopefully we can get an outreach event started with them as soon as we can meet in person!

Finance:

In Finance we’ve done three fundraisers. We organized the Sarris Candies Holiday  and Choolaah fundraisers, and  we partnered with ProKnitwear who set up a GoS merch store for us. We also collected donations for Women’s Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh. Some of our families offered to host contact-free drop-off locations for the donations.

Finance started a few new projects this year as well, like rewriting the Business Plan and creating Sponsorship Materials. For the business plan, we first analyzed other team’s business plans. Then we redid our business plan’s structure and revamped some graphics. We are currently in the process of rewriting all the sections (we are about 75% done). For Sponsorship, we created a letter to send to sponsors and prospective sponsors and started creating an “impact document.” 

Also, Video is making us a Sponsor/Partnerships Video with interviews of alums, and current members, including our FLL members. Finally, the last thing we’ve been doing in Finance is updating team expenses and income and trying to create budget proposals for whenever we have crowdfunding in the spring.  

We are grateful for all our sponsors.

FIRST Ladies:

We were able to create a steady newsletter posting schedule and were able to plan a game night all while figuring out how to run our new sub team efficiently. Check out our blog post about our game night event as well as our website.  Also, here’s the latest newsletter.

FLL:

For the 2020 FLL season, Girls of Steel FLL was entirely virtual, meeting on Zoom every Saturday from 2-4 pm. Our subteam consists of two co-leads (Janise and Justina) and members (Ananya, Ariella, Elise, and Megan) who attended just about every team meeting.  Aria, Lauren, Gigi, Dusty, and Hannah also mentored with us.  This year’s challenge was to choose a problem and then propose a solution to increase the activity level of people. The four teams selected different problems ranging from outdoor gyms to fitness apps. After meeting with Mr. Bob Gillingham, a fitness professional and the founder and owner of CrossFit Glen Burnie in Maryland, the teams created their own websites displaying their research and their final solution. In addition, students also worked on individual Scratch projects which they presented on Demo Day along with the team websites. Here’s the blog post about the research projects created in collaboration with all the FLL teams.

Media Image:

We had a really successful preseason! We worked on many projects, including making templates for our social media posts, making a mask-rosie image, and designing Girls of Steel 3D printed keychains. This season was particularly successful as Image is a new subteam. All of the girls got to know each other through working on projects, and chatting at the end of meetings.

Outreach:

This preseason, Outreach has finished updating the impact document, revamped the guidelines for champion system, and started the partnership project.  We also ended the preseason with sharing a “Thank You!” card and video with health care providers and workers at UPMC, Allegheny Health Network, and Magee Hospital.  Also, the FTC Liaisons, Somdatta and Maggie, coordinated a meeting to introduce the FTC girls to shadowing FRC during build season.  Check out the “FTC Shadowing Opportunities” presentation here.  We also created “Rosie Talks” a webinar series featuring girls and women in STEM from the Pittsburgh area.  Check out the Session 1 presentation here.  Other sessions are coming up on January 10th (register here), February 7th, March 7th, and April 11th.  Contact us at girlsofsteelrobotics@gmail.com for more information.

Media Visual:

After finding out that the Chairman’s video was cancelled this year we found ourselves having to reevaluate our goals for the pre-season. We decided to prioritize our photo reorganization efforts and we collaborated with the Partnerships effort to create a video for them. As part of that video we had the chance to interview several alums, an experience we all enjoyed. We’re also making a general branding video the team will be able to showcase at various events using some of the script from the Chairman’s video. We had such a fun time this season and look forward to continuing our work in 2021!

Technical Subteams

The tech side of the team faced a challenge of adapting our preseason teaching curriculum and projects to the all virtual format, but nonetheless the entire team was able to find a way to be successful. We viewed the virtual format as an opportunity to focus on teaching as much as we could; and we used this preseason to improve our virtual communication, documentation, and organization as a team. 

Design:

In the beginning of preseason, the new girls became familiar with Onshape, and the returning members got their CADing back in shape with a few exercises. After everyone was ready, we began our partnered projects with designing custom gearboxes. The team members had a great time and gained a lot of experience and practice. After the gearboxes, we transferred our 2020 robot from Solidworks, the software that we have normally used, to Onshape, the new software that we have switched to. We worked to get the CAD back into working shape so that we can use it in our work on “Infinite Recharge at Home” during the 2021 build season.

Electrical:

In Electrical we’ve mostly been going for the learning approach (because of COVID-19 and also because the majority of the team was new to Elec), so I’ve been primarily teaching. We went over all electrical components, how to power wire a robot, CAN (signal) wire robot, how to make wires/crimp wires, how to set up a pneumatic system, different sensors and their uses/application (we went over IMUs and then external sensors). To promote retention of this information we did a bunch of Kahoots and a few projects like drawing a wiring diagram and researching a new sensor projects. (Also I think a lot of the materials made for this year like the teaching slideshows and Kahoots can be used in future years to help teach new team members.  Then we spent about 3 weeks on learning how to CAD and CADing our own e-boards. One of the Electronic’s goals this year was to learn how to CAD so everyone can help design the e-board(s). Also in past years, the e-board is usually prioritized last so it’s usually not completely CADed until after or during competition. During build season one of our projects will be to re-design last year’s e-board to be more modular.

Mechanical:

This preseason mechanical decided to focus more on teaching than we have in years past. Our mechanical team is usually focused on very hands-on work, but because we were virtual we chose to teach more conceptual topics and things we wouldn’t normally get to do. We used this time to learn more CAD using Onshape, and later implemented these skills in projects. Our main project was making a catapult out of cardboard at home, and then CADing said design. In coming seasons, the mechanical subteam plans to continue doing more design and trying to find more ways to build mechanisms using materials available at home.

Programming:

Although it was remote, Programming still made the most of this preseason. Our main project was writing code for a new Outreach Bot. We mainly did pair programming, in which we got to collaborate with others in writing the code, and programmed the shooter, collector, and chassis for the robot. To test our code, we used a simulator, which allowed us to see how our code would function on the hardware of the robot. We also did small, mini activities called CodeLabs, where we got to learn miscellaneous programming concepts through the activities. Some CodeLabs we did involved getting familiar with GitHub code organization and testing out the simulator with a mini robot. Although we didn’t get the in-person experience, it was still a great preseason and we are looking forward to build season!