Girls of Steel has a variety of programs for all ages. We run four main FIRST programs to teach science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by working on robots of various sizes. We also have some other programs that happen periodically throughout the year.
Our Robotics Programs
7th through 12th grade students
Our newly restructured program focuses on teaching technical and business skills to girls through building, programming, and competing with robots in the FIRST Robotics competitions.
The program works by focusing on teaching technical and business still through the FIRST Tech Challenge program. Students will work in small crews to produce robots following the year’s competition rules. The students also work on presentations for awards judges, document their process in engineering notebooks, and learn project management to produce a robot. The crews will compete at an internal competition as well as competitions in the Pittsburgh area.
Students that have demonstrated learning and expertise can move into our FIRST Robotics Competition program. Using more advanced skills to produce a larger robot, they will compete against other teams in the region.
Our 7th-12th grade program runs from August through approximately March/April.
4nd through 6th grade students
For our all-gender middle program, we introduce science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to children through fun, exciting hands-on learning and building. Students also compete in FIRST LEGO League Challenge competitions, which compete on one vs one matches while students also give presentations on inventions that they create related to the competition’s theme.
This program will run on Saturdays for a few months in the fall. We’ll release dates soon.
1st through 3th grade students
Similar to the 4th-6th program, our youngest all-gender program also introduces science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to children through the use of LEGO robots. We use the FIRST LEGO League Explore program, which focuses more on learning to build LEGO structures to learn about engineering topics.
Our FLL Explore program has typically run on Saturdays in the spring.
Summer camps
We usually run some summer camps for students of various age groups to help them experience robotics. These camps can include working with Girl Scouts to help them earn robotics badges, inviting students from China to build and compete in an FIRST Robotics Competition off-season event, and teaching kids to use tools to build little “Meep Boop” robots.
Our summer camp offerings vary by year. We’ll try to publicize them as soon as we’re aware what we’re doing that summer.
For summer 2024, we will only be running FLL Explore and FLL Challenge week-long camps.
Does your child want to join us?
We would love to have you join! We typically open applications for our programs in the summer and summer camps in the spring. Students need to reapply every year.
We have a mailing list for updates to our programs as well as announcements of when applications open.