Our First In-Person Meeting since March 2020!
After 18 months of isolation on virtual meetings, on Tuesday October 19th Girls of Steel FRC reunited in person! Our first meeting was characterized by meeting new faces, reuniting with friends, and excitement about finally getting to work hands-on. We are lucky to be able to utilize our practice field space at Carnegie Mellon at 6555 Penn Ave. for technical meetings on Tuesdays. Our FIRST Tech Challenge teams started on October 21st using the practice field on Thursdays, while the FLL Mentors and BuzzBand team meet there on Saturdays. For now, our business and leadership meetings are still on Zoom.
We dedicated the purpose of the first in-person meeting to celebrating being back and building interpersonal relationships with icebreakers as a full team and within our subteams.
After 30 minutes of meeting in our business subteams, we had a technical meeting.
Here’s what we worked on:
Design spent some time learning about how robots are built by looking at the last robot we built together. They learned about the different parts we use and how they fit together, as well as the importance of designing a robot that is easy to build.
On mechanical we built some new tables for the sub team to use at the practice field and built a new storage shelf also for the practice field. After these were done, members worked on taking apart old robot parts to begin to get familiar with the tools used on mechanical.
On programming the subteam demoed the robot and learned the functions and subsystems that we will be programming. We also worked on our individual codelabs in order to make sure everyone was comfortable using intelliJ and github.
On electrical team took apart our 2018 robot’s e-board. This served as an opportunity to teach new members about how all the electrical components work together as well as take inventory. We also analyzed our old robot and e-board and discussed better design choices and practices that would improve it.
Check back soon for our next preseason update!