Our ninth Girls of Steel Preseason meeting (11/29/16) went well. Every girl is working hard and contributing to the team, we have three more weeks (including this week) to get everything done before build season. We began the meeting with our All Hands Meeting (all hands slideshow link), where we all convened and went over the agenda for the FTC and FRC girls. We then got our question of the week – Who can name 3 of our sponsors?- and learned about some of the many sponsors of the Girls of Steel. We also were informed about the new mission statement challenge! We once again went over our important team goals, and were given some other reminders.

We had a guest speaker, Mr. Satya Rao, who told us about the U.S. Congressional award, in which we can participate. Then, the girls talked about the new fundraiser, a Bookfair at Barnes & Noble starting on December 11th. A Bookfair flyer and vouchers will be emailed to everyone. We got a great update from two of our FTC girls, who told us about the wonderful work they are getting done. George wasn’t here this week, but Arushi took his place and talked to us a little more about communication and being “transparent” with everyone on the team (referred to this article). Lastly we talked a little about the End of Preseason Project and then we dispersed to business time and the FTC girls went to their meeting.

During business time, each business team went over their daily tasks and prepared for future events. The media team worked on their video, as well as continued to take photos of every subteam. In Outreach, the girls discussed upcoming events and reviewed how to run a robot demo. There are many opportunities for outreach in December, like gift wrapping at Barnes & Noble, an Assemble Learning Party, the Junior Achievement Career Fair, as well as our usual FLL meetings. At finance, the girls were putting together the gift bags of personal items for donating to Bethlehem Haven, a woman’s shelter, that the team is visiting soon to talk about our program. They also worked on the business plan.

In technical time, the girls continued to work on the EOPP bots. One team has decided to follow the model of our summer program Feiyue’s bot, while the other team decided to create a piston based shooter that is new. Mechanical worked on building the parts for the bots, as well as individualizing the shooters and determining the correct length and angles in order to shoot a high goal. The electrical team worked to fix the pneumatics board, and to fix a pesky leak.

It was another great meeting, we are going to keep persevering until build season, a couple more weeks to go! Good job everyone!