We recently took our 2016 robot, Byte, to the Greater Pittsburgh Regional Competition at California University of Pennsylvania, March 10-12, 2016 to compete in the FIRST Stronghold Challenge!

It was a great experience that was fun and educational at the same time. New girls and returning girls alike were able to discover the fun of seeing Byte in action after 6 weeks of building.

Our team makes sure that all of the girls are given the opportunity to work in the pit and scout. It is made sure that there is a girl from each mechanical sub-team (electronics, mechanical and programming) and awards team and a safety captain (shoutout to Gigi for being honored as the Safety Star of the day on Friday!!!) in the pit at all times.

We do several types of scouting. We always have multiple girls in the stands watching the other robots and taking notes about their performance during the matches. Additionally each girl is assigned a team to talk to about their design. Some girls ask the team about the design of mechanisms while others focus on how their team is set up (including sub-teams, mentors, outreach, and schedule during build season).

Some girls also enjoyed volunteering at the safety glasses table where they not only earned outreach credit but they were able to meet and greet dozens of students and guests.

Byte did an awesome job in all of the matches! Byte was completely functional during all of it’s matches and the drive team truly did the team proud. We ranked 24th out of 52 teams. We were later chosen to be on the number 8 alliance along with MARS (FRC 2614) and the Trojanators (FRC 5740).  We were very excited to make it to the quarterfinals and cannot wait to compete again at the Queen City Regional March 31-April 2, 2016.

Also some super exciting news… we received the Entrepreneurship Award!! We received this for our business plan (shoutout to everyone who contributed!).

Overall it was a very successful regional and we cannot wait for the Queen City Regional coming up soon!

A huge thank you to all of our sponsors, mentors and parents for giving the students such a valuable experience!