For the Girls of Steel, preseason meetings are over. Now all that is left to do is count down until kick-off, which is at 10:30 am on January 5th. That means only 17 and a half more days!!! For any of you that are interested, a countdown clock was made and can be seen here. Once kick-off is held, a six week long build season, from January 5th until February 19th, begins, and all the action happens!
Congratulations to Rachel, Naoka, Sonia, and Sophia!!! These girls are NCWIT (National Center for Women in Information Technology) National Award Runners-Up! Out of the 275 girls from across the country that are the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing National Award Runners-Up, four of them are on the Girls of Steel team! These girls also won the Central and Western PA/West Virginia regional affiliate NCWIT award. This organization “honors young women at the high-school level for their computing-related achievements and interests. Awardees are selected for their computing and IT aptitude, leadership ability, academic history, and plans for post-secondary education.”
During last week’s meeting, on December 11th, the last preseason meeting , a parent meeting was held. A slideshow that summarized the team’s preseason activities and plans for build season was presented by Shana Leshko and Patti Rote. Afterwards, the parents went on a tour of the high bay, which is where the majority of the building of the robot takes place.
For a while now, the girls have been talking about goals they would like to focus on. Last week they voted on working to make a competitive robot, although the other options –maintaining a positive team culture and working to improve the FIRST community in Pittsburgh- came in a close second and third. They brainstormed possible goals to achieve while maintaining their main focus, and those suggestions were put into categories and merged with other similar ones. Now the girls are voting on one from each category that they think will be the best possible goals for this season.
As was said in the last post, each of the technical sub-teams continued to work on completing their part of the swerve drive and six-wheel-drop mini-projects. They were built by the chassis team, programmers worked on the code, and electronics board was completed by, well, who other than the electronics team!