HYPATIA: Team 9820, Girls of Steel Hypatia finished the season off strong by coming in 13th place at the Southwestern PA qualifier on January 11th. At the beginning of the day, after passing inspections, three of our team members went out and scouted. From the last competition, we learned that it is vital to make your team’s name known amongst the other teams. However, it was very hard to keep our name separated from our sister teams, Hopper and Lovelace. Every time we would try and make our presence known with the other teams, they would ask us which one we were. This was just one of the hurdles we faced.

During one of our matches, the wire connecting the robot battery to the expansion hub snapped. We believed this was due to the Skystone game piece hitting this connection point frequently. Despite the ability to not be able to compete in that match, we were able to coach our alliance team to move the foundation into the building site, and they were nearly able to move it out.

From this final competition of the season, we were able to enhance our team building skills in spite of all of the setbacks.  Now we’re ready to move on and continue our Tuesday FTC meetings to keep learning and also to shadow Girls of Steel FRC members on Mondays, Thursdays, or Saturdays.

HOPPER: Overall, team 9821, Girls of Steel Hopper, had an amazing qualifier! Although we place 16th out of 23 teams overall, our driving and matches were far beyond our expectations. We didn’t get even one penalty throughout the whole competition, which was a big step up from our last qualifier where our claw came in the way during a match which earned us multiple major penalties.

This qualifier, we went as a complete pushbot, and from our resulting performance, we learned that sometimes it’s better to stick with one reliable mechanism rather than trying to add many complex attachments that only worked for half the time. One component of the competition that really stood out was our driving. Mia M., our driver for the majority of our events, did really well, also taking into consideration the amount of time that we had to practice. The others drivers were Anuva G. and Harshitha L., who drove for one round each. Aria N. was the coach and Gloria W. was our human player, while Rishika S. was our main programmer (especially for autonomous). As a pushbot, we were really effective in getting stones and delivering them to our (usually) stacking alliance partners. In our last round, we scored 59 points with our alliance! Not only did we deliver points quickly, we also moved the foundation out of the building site without losing our opportunity to park. This brought us many unexpected points that only helped our ranking.

One new thing that we really focused on at this qualifier was our scouting attempts. We learned that a lot of other teams were in similar positions to us, as well as letting them learn about our team and making some new friends! Along with our driving and matches, our judging also went really well. We were very chill and our judges seem to be very curious about our various outreach efforts, our robot, and our code.

Probably the biggest highlight was winning the first place Think Award. The Think Award is an award given to the team whose engineering notebook “best exhibits the design engineering process and journey.” We were very surprised when we won this award, and it was a memorable moment for all of us. It is also the first time that a Girls of Steel FTC team has ever won an award!! From getting second to last in our first qualifier, this was a huge progression!

Our whole team has had an amazing season, and we’ve come a really long way since the start of the season and we couldn’t be happier with how it ended!  Our team is also planning to continue to attend Tuesday FTC meetings and then shadow FRC girls on Mondays, Thursdays, or Saturdays.

LOVELACE: In our final qualifier, Lovelace, FTC 9981, had an improved placement from the last competition, which we we were thrilled about. Team Lovelace earned 14th place this time. We went through the inspection and scouted all the teams in the morning before the matches, which also resulted in the teams knowing more about us through sheets we handed out with our robot functions and strategies. If they are team captains, they would know our potential and could possibly choose us if they decide we would be a great fit for their alliance in semifinals.

For judging, our team worked hard to better our engineering notebook and business plan to help us with awards. With the experience from the competition before, we improved and thought we did pretty well, and we definitely improved from the judging portion of the last competition.

During our five matches, we did great during tele-op, or the driver control period. On most of the matches, we were able to get about 5-6 blocks, which could allow our alliance partner to quickly stack the blocks. During the last few team meetings before the competition, we created an autonomous that could park and move the foundation, which could give us 15 points. This didn’t work as planned. With different battery voltages, the speed in which the robot moved was different, so we had to adjust the speed of each move using our phone controller. However, the first four matches, the foundation was off from getting into the building site by about an inch. In the last match, we finally got it to work, and we ended our final match on a high note, winning that round with an alliance partner we knew well from the scrimmage and first qualifier. We didn’t get selected for semifinals or won an award, but we were pleased with the outcome, and the competition was exciting and fun. We met new friends and talked to teams we became close with from the competition before.

Just like the other teams, Lovelace is also planning to continue to attend Tuesday FTC meetings and then shadow FRC girls on Mondays, Thursdays, or Saturdays.  We’re excited to see what happens next!

We’d like to thank our FTC mentors, Austin and Michelle, Aditi S, the Girls of Steel FTC liaison, and the many Girls of Steel members who attended our scrimmage and qualifier events.  We had a great season!  At the meeting after competition we celebrated with a cookie cake –  Congratulations, everyone!

Finally, we’d like to thank the event hosts, the Brainstem FTC teams, for giving us the awesome team numbers!