Another year of the Girls of Steel has just begun! It’s our 9th season! Preseason just started two weeks ago on September 25th, and the team has already been diligently working to be ahead of the game. Our business side is our first priority right now, as well as our End of Preseason Project (EOPP).
Since our preseason has just started, the business side of the team is trying to get all of our affairs in order. The media team has been assigning people to our social media accounts to start posting, and we even created a Snapchat account! We have also been going over different logos for shirts, pins, and brochures, and Mr. Pope gave the girls a lesson on how to use Adobe Illustrator. The Finance team is updating the business plan and assigning different sections to different girls for reviewing and collecting data. They have also been researching non profits and fundraisers for the team this year. The team is also collaborating with our new business subteam, Video, on a video for this year’s crowdfunding campaign. The video team has finalized the script for the crowdfunding video and has brainstormed with the Awards team for their collaboration on the video for the Chairman’s Award. The Awards team looked over presentation expectations and past essays for awards. They narrowed down ideas for a theme for this year’s Chairman’s Awards and have started outlining the essays.
On the technical side, on Thursday, September 27th we attended annual shop training and held our Tech Taste Testers for new girls to see what technical subteam they would like to join. With our training underway, we started brainstorming and constructing our EOPP. The Design team brushed up on CAD skills and started designing the shooter. The Electronics team familiarized themselves with the tools and learned how to assemble powerpoles. The Programming team started reviewing coding basics, and the Mechanical team fixed up Clyde, our robot from last competition, to be ready for competing at Ra Cha Cha Ruckus later this month in Rochester NY.
And last but not least, our FTC teams are back, starting with a boot camp and a regular meeting the week before FRC meetings started. This year the FTC girls have three teams called Girls of Steel Hypatia, Lovelace, and Hopper. They are learning parts of the robot kits and reviewing previous robots for design inspiration. They also watched their challenge for the competition this year, Rover Ruckus, and started brainstorming strategies and how to design the chassis and mechanisms.
Overall, the season is off to a great start, with all our girls working hard to stay on track for this year to be even more successful than the last. Stay tuned for our next biweekly update!