On August 3rd, the Girls of Steel attended the Steel City Showdown, held in the Wiegand Gym at Carnegie Mellon University, our home base! The competition featured 22 teams, 2 of which were our very own Robotics Feiyue camp teams, Feiyue Hurricane and Feiyue Tornado! More about the Feiyue program can be found here. We also had several other other off-season teams, like Red Card Rumblers, a group of students from multiple FRC teams who spent Friday and Saturday building their robot from scratch! Playoffs were done round-robin style, so each alliance got to play 5 matches to determine their playoff seed, and the top 2 alliances played in the final matches.

Girls of Steel had a great time, and we ranked 1st at the end of qualifying matches. We formed an alliance with team 3015, Ranger Robotics; team 9989, Feiyue Hurricane; and team 9985, Titanium Titans Beta. Unfortunately, our alliance didn’t fair as well in playoffs as in the qualifying matches, and ranked 5th out of 6. However we had lots of fun working with our alliance partners and we were so proud of our Feiyue teams. Our team used this off-season competition as a learning experience for girls thinking about joining our drive team, or just wanted to see what driving a robot was like, which was fantastic and so much fun.

Our other Feiyue team, Feiyue Tornado, also did excellent and was selected by the 2nd alliance, captained by 4027, Centre County 4-H Robotics. They ranked 4th at the end of the round robin and had a blast (pun intended!) playing the game. We were also incredibly proud of them. Both of our Feiyue teams did amazing with robots built by students (most of whom had little to no experience) in just 2 weeks.

The competition was a great way to spend the off-season and was insanely fun. We were glad to be competing alongside the off-season teams and hope that they enjoyed it as much as we did. We hope to see the teams again at a competition in the 2020 season, Infinite Recharge!

We would like to congratulate the winning alliance, 4150 FRobotics, 1511 Rolling Thunder, 2151 The Beattie Bulldogs, and 7055 Quantum Steam.

Photo credits: Girls of Steel Robotics and ISR video team.