This past year has been anything but uneventful for the Girls of Steel. As we head into the second half of our 12th season, many of our subteams have had major accomplishments. After a series of workshops over the summer, the FLL subteam is wrapped up their FLL Challenge season in December, but next up they will prepare for the FLL Explore season. Not only does our team reach out to younger generations of students interested in STEM, but our Outreach team is currently hosting a recurring webinar event called “Rosie Talks.” These discussions feature a STEM professional and a Girls of Steel member presenting on their STEM background and career path. Through the efforts of our communications team, we have been able to post messages regarding the activity of the FIRST Ladies sub team. They hosted a virtual game night to bring teams  together in order to celebrate Women in STEM. Thanks to our image and visual subteams, we have been able to make fabulous videos to send out after our very successful recent crowdfunding effort. Last, but certainly not least, Girls of Steel runs two very successful special projects. These projects  give girls additional exposure to ways STEM can be incorporated at a real-world scale. The COVIDcast project is a current project that gives girls the opportunity to see how tracking and sharing live pandemic data works. Moreover, our 2021 Innovation Challenge project, the BuzzBand, is still going strong after receiving a $10,000 grant as one of the eight  2022 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams!

Business Subteams summaries:

Advocacy: During preseason, our Advocacy team was able to reach out to Congressman Mike Doyle and plan to meet with him in the spring, work on a infographic about Advocacy for FIRST teams to be put on both the Girls of Steel website and the SASA website before the next NAC, and were able to gather information from the team about the importance of STEM access for underrepresented groups. 

Awards: The Awards subteam worked on our team’s Chairman’s essays as well as the content of the “Outreach Booklet” that we worked on in partnership with the Image subteam. These projects were a great way for newer members to learn about what our team does and where we can improve. Awards will continue to work into build season to prepare for the Chairman’s presentations at competitions. 

DEI: For the first half of preseason, DEI researched underrepresented groups/historically overlooked groups. Going more into that, DEI looked into STEM inequity within those groups in Pittsburgh. Using that research and analyzing it, the subteam was able to focus into a specific community: socioeconomic diversity through geographic diversity. From there, DEI could reach out to organization(s) to potentially make connections with and hold outreach events with. Besides that, DEI accomplished discussing suggestion box ideas, brainstorming ways to revamp the big/little system, and hopefully making the team more connected and safe.

Image: During preseason, Image girls improved their graphic design skills by making graphics, pamphlets, instagram posts, profile pictures, buttons, and more!  These designs were used in various ways across all of Girls of Steel. Going forward and into build season, Image is going to continue to work in partnership with Awards to make the “Outreach Booklet” for competitions. 

FLL: The FLL subteam worked with GoS mentors and 24 grade 4 to 8 students interested in STEM. Throughout their 12-week season they learned about various types of coding, organized data, used core values, and planned Cargo Connect missions – all to help them practice for the competition next season. With the help of our amazing mentors, we presented slides, taught lessons, and guided students to learn and grow both tech and business skills. Ultimately each FLL Challenge created a website to showcase their accomplishments. Check out their work here.

Finance: During the preseason, the finance team held multiple fundraisers – crowdfunding, Sarris chocolate bars, and Sarris Holiday candies – to help girls not only meet their requirements, but to help raise money for competition travel and robot expenses. Despite the challenges of being online, we were still able to host a successful crowdfunding campaign and raise over $10,000! In addition, one of our goals this year was to build a strong network of partners, so throughout the season, we sent numerous letters to companies that we want to have a relationship with. 

FIRST Ladies: Throughout preseason FIRST Ladies has been working on increasing the number of newsletter subscribers and their regional partners. Halfway through the preseason we met our goal of having 40 regional partners and started working on our goal to have a regional partner in every single state. We have consistently sent out monthly newsletters – check out December’s – and blog posts and successfully ran our annual FIRST Ladies game night on December 10th. We can’t wait to spread our reach throughout the competition and build season, and stayed tuned for our GPR event! 

Visual: We have been working to get new footage and use it in all of our videos. For example, on our first day back at the practice field, we not only recorded all of the monologues we would need to film our crowdfunding video, but also took new photos and videos of the field. From here, we edited the crowdfunding video and other smaller projects. Currently, we are working on our Chairman’s video submission, with the script nearly completed and monologues going underway. We’re so excited to see what we come up with for Chairman’s at competition! 

Outreach: Throughout the end of pre-season, the subteam has primarily focused on coordinating our virtual outreach initiatives, specifically Rosie Talks.  So far we’ve successfully hosted two sessions, and we look forward to continuing with three more during the build season and potentially into post-season.  

Tech Subteams summaries:

Mechanical: Mechanical girls worked on refreshing and learning technical skills coming off the virtual season. This was done through many lessons on things like gearboxes, chains, and power tools. Girls also put these skills into use through assembling and disassembling old robots and outreach bots.

Electrical: This year electrical focused on learning skills like wire-making, crimping, soldering, and more. We also focused on learning about E-board design: learning how all the components work and the advantages/disadvantages of different E-board archetypes. In terms of hands-on work, we disassembled old E-boards, took inventory, and assembled an E-board for the chassis robot. 

Design: Design focused on teaching its newer members how to CAD, and refreshing the skills of older members who were less confident after having spent a year online. We did this through “CAD Lessons” and by working on our Outreach Bot project, which aims to have a fully designed FRC-style robot we can create and bring to outreach events. 

Programming: Programming has primarily focused on remotely completing our pre-season tasks and transitioning into build season, where we hope to integrate some of our completed work into the competition robot’s code.  Furthermore, we are currently coordinating with other subteams to map out the logistics for both autonomous and tele-op.

Special Projects

BuzzBand

There are nine Girls of Steel members on our BuzzBand team. Our press release on December 9th resulted in a lot of “buzz” around the BuzzBand project. Check out all our updates on the Girls of Steel website here.https://girlsofsteelrobotics.com/innovationchallenge/

COVIDcast

The six Girls of Steel members on the COVIDcast team meet every Wednesday with our mentor, Katie, a researcher at CMU’s Delphi group, and we discuss the various indicators we track for anomalies and other items related to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as survey updates and national news.

Check back again soon for the build season updates!