News

This was a very exciting week for Girls of Steel! Starting with one of the biggest days of the season, kickoff! Kickoff was on January 4th and most of the Girls of Steel watched from Carnegie Mellon University, but some of us went to the local kickoff event to pick up the of parts and met members of the 501st Legion Starkiller Garrison. Everyone arrived ready to see the Infinite Recharge challenge, which looks to be every exciting! As soon as we watched the challenge video and had a chance to read over…continue reading →

Girls of Steel has been working on a lot of exciting projects recently, which was continued in the business meeting on November 19th. The finance team planned another Choolaah fundraiser, but this time on a Wednesday in December on the 11th. They also put together the Pittsburgh Popcorn fundraiser which will hopefully run in February. Finally, they put together their gift basket for the Girls of Steel holiday party coming up on December 15th. The other subteams also put together their gift baskets, each subteam is doing something different.  For example, the media…continue reading →

The first qualifier, December 7th, West Central PA Qualifier, at Pitt Johnstown, and the scrimmage, November 23rd at North Catholic, were vastly different. In the scrimmage, teams had very little code ready and almost no driving practice. The qualifier was different and much better for all teams.    Early into the competition, Hopper decided to take off their claw and become a pushbot. This led to not having nearly as many issues as at the scrimmage, since one of their major problems was that the claw would get stuck on the floor and…continue reading →

This is only our second blog post, but the progress we have made since our first one is tremendous. With the scrimmage behind us and our first qualifier approaching, all three of our teams switched into high gear and worked extremely hard in order to build operating robots. We made lots of changes and advancements, but seeing the development of our robots and skills have made us all extremely proud.  Starting where we left off in our first update... For Lovelace, 9981, October 17th started the beginning of the reformation of our attachment. Half…continue reading →

Our four FIRST LEGO teams have been meeting once a week since August 2019 ending after the competition on December 14, 2019. They wanted to share with you highlights of their City Shaper research projects.  Their challenge was to choose a problem with a building or public space, create a solution, and share it.  The teams met with multiple experts and went on field trips to support their research.  Here's a list of the experts they consulted: CMU Stan Caldwell Jeremy Ficca Jamison Fielding Mike Kelley Costa Samaras Wilkins School Community Center Patty…continue reading →

Anyone familiar with science fiction knows how important robots are to our vision of the future. Ask the average person to describe what life will be like in 100 years, and the chances are good that he or she will mention robots. But in most modern manufacturing facilities, the future is already here. Thanks to advancements made by engineers, programmers and robotics manufacturers, automated systems currently are a big — and essential — part of industry. That role is expected to grow even larger as time goes on, and for good reason. Robots offer a number…continue reading →

The whole team is pushing through preseason and making incredible progress on end of preseason technical projects (EOPPs) - more on that below. Media is thinking creatively to make a robot display to celebrate our tenth year anniversary! They are also working on an info sheet to promote the team and spread information other teams and people may not know. Their other projects include organizing photos and updating the website.  The inclusion subteam has been planning an outreach event for different schools in our area to reach more people in different communities. This…continue reading →

The Girls of Steel sub teams are working through a rigorous preseason and are actively completing their goals! Beginning with business, the finance team updated the sponsor letter and the business plan. Deciding which expenses this year’s crowdfunding fundraiser will cover went from robot parts to travel, at least in part. They thoroughly discussed this year’s budget and brainstormed fundraising, expenses, and presenting budget ideas to the whole team. The Inclusion team organized the Girls of Steel diversity data and compared it to the data of Allegheny County. They also had an essential…continue reading →

The Girls of Steel FTC 2019-2020 Season SKYSTONE has begun! Here is our first blog post discussing the progress we’ve had so far this season!  We meet twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays at CMU.  We have the same meeting schedule as the Girls of Steel preseason, except that our events and competitions are in November, December, and January.  If you're curious about who we are, check out the members' page on the Girls of Steel website. We first met each other on Sunday, September 15th at the annual FTC Bootcamp.  That's…continue reading →

Every year we host fantastic female role models for Girls of Steel.  Past speakers include Julia Parsons, WWII codebreaker; Carnegie Mellon University Professors Henny Admoni and Jessica Hodgins; and PPG executive Rebecca Liebert. Girls of Steel was pleased to have Leanne Meyer, the Executive Director of the Accelerate Leadership Center at the Tepper School of Business and Program Director of the Carnegie Mellon Leadership and Negotiation Academy for Women, speak at one of our meetings.  Leanne began her mission in South Africa and was inspired by events that occurred in her home country. Her…continue reading →

Welcome to the 2019-2020 season of FIRST!  We started off our 10th season in FIRST on September 15th with a Boot Camp for our FTC girls. The FTC girls are all new to FTC so the boot camp is designed for them to get to know each other while learning to use the robotics kits to build a simple push-bot robot chassis. For Girls of Steel, the FTC program is for 8th and 9th grade girls who want to learn about what it's like to be on a robotics team before joining FRC…continue reading →

As usual, the summer of 2019 was packed with amazing outreach events for Girls of Steel! We continued our summer camps, attended and hosted events, and worked towards our finance goals. We worked hard throughout the summer to transition into a 2019-2020 successful season filled with more opportunities to work with the community! "Festival in the Park" Blueberry Hill Park in Franklin Park: Chassis Project, June 29, 2019 The Girls of Steel chassis projects are always a great way to reach out to people of all ages in the community. These events are…continue reading →

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…continue reading →

Another successful year for Girls of Steel Robotics at WOW Championships! This was our third year qualifying for and competing at this event. The competition was held in Austintown, Ohio on May 18 at Austintown Fitch High School, going from 7:00 am until 6:00  pm. There were 12 girls in attendance that helped make it an amazing experience! Girls of Steel made it through qualifications and placed seventh. We were the captain of alliance 6 and had teams 3324 (Metrobots), 4269 (Cardinal Bots), and 7274 (Brashear) playing alongside us. We were eliminated in…continue reading →

From April 24 to April 27, the Girls of Steel attended the 2019 World Championship in Detroit, after qualifying at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional with a wild card awarded to us as captains of the finalist alliance. The great news is that both of our alliance partners, FRC 4150 FRobotics and FRC 1787 Flying Circuits received wild cards for championships, too! Below is a photo taken during our pre-championship practice on April 14th. On the 24th we boarded the bus at 5:30 am and drove to Detroit, Michigan, where the FIRST Championship would…continue reading →

March 21-23, 2019 we attended the Greater Pittsburgh Regional qualifier at California University of Pennsylvania. On Thursday, practice day at the competition, Girls of Steel hosted a FIRST Ladies Meetup at lunch with Pratima Gluckman, the author of Nevertheless She Persisted, a book where she interviewed and wrote about women in leadership positions in tech fields. She talked to us about the importance of persistence, bravery, and good mentors for success. One of our members, Alex G., said of the event: “I learned that no matter the obstacles thrown our way, women can…continue reading →

Girls of Steel Hypatia FTC 9820 Though our regional competition had unfortunately been cancelled and then postponed, we were excited to know that we had some extra time to work on our robot before the next competition on February 24, 2019, at Upper St. Clair High School. We used this time to add some new mechanisms to our robot, such as a hook for latching, and plastic blockers next to our wheels so that minerals didn’t get stuck in them. Since we now had a latch, we were able to add much more…continue reading →

Wednesday, March 6th marked the start of our exciting journey to Dayton, Ohio for the Destination Deep Space Miami Valley Regional Competition (MVR). After a long bus ride from Pittsburgh we arrived at our hotel to get a restful night before a day full of practice, adjustments, and inspection at MVR at the Nutter Center at Wright State University.  While we experienced some difficulty with our climber mechanism during practice day, ultimately we overcame it and we were able to successfully compete in 6 qualifying matches on Friday.  Our pit crew, lead by…continue reading →

Week 6 ended with Bag & Tag at NREC on Tuesday, February 19, 2019 and the Girls of Steel team has been more productive than ever.  The strategy and analysis teams worked on creating a spreadsheet on scouting strategy. The programming team finished the baby drive for Lidar code as well as tested the pivot and the climber on Laika.  Baby drive was essentially a program developed to assist the robot in climbing. The electronics team helped mount and set up the electronics board on Laika.  They mounted the encoder and configured the…continue reading →

On February 16th, 2019, Girls of Steel hosted eight other FRC teams at the annual Week Zero Scrimmage. As always, it was held in our practice field at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC). It was so exciting to see each team test their robots and compete in this year’s FIRST game of Destination Deep Space! The day started with team check-ins at 10:30 am, then at 11:00 am, teams began to practice and test their robots for the scrimmage matches. After having pizza for lunch, the scrimmage matches began at 1:00 pm…continue reading →

As we are coming close to the end of our build season, the Girls of Steel are working extremely hard to finish up our robots!! One more week left! On Saturday, February 2nd, our chairman’s team ran a chassis project workshop and it went great. Drive team started practicing this week! During our 4 build meetings and 1 drive meeting this week, lots of progress was made. This week the electronics team cut and mounted all the parts onto the second E-board, Mounted the camera on the bar, and figured out a place…continue reading →

During week 4 we know we're approaching the deadline for Miami Valley Regional; the team has been working at the peak of its productivity.   The collector team finished cutting designs for the collector prototype and assembled it. The mechanical team started to build the competition robot; voted to be named Laika by the entire team, with the practice robot to be named Belka.   Sides of both the robots were fixed to be even, and the team is currently working on attaching the wheels and driving the practice robot around. The chassis…continue reading →

The Girls of Steel have just finished the third week of build season, and everyone is still going strong! We have just reached the halfway point! We are coming close to Miami Valley Regional and all the girls are super excited! This week, we made great progress with our usual Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday meetings. This week we welcomed our junior members for shadowing us. They'll be shadowing through the rest of build season in addition to getting ready for their rescheduled FTC qualifying competition - now on February 24th. Several very…continue reading →

The Girls of Steel team has had a successful second build season week!  The electronics team cleaned up gearboxes, fixed pneumatics as well as the issue with their compressor because crimps on wires were not on properly.  Additionally, they tested the talons and used CAD to design the electronics board. The mechanical team continued building prototype field parts, prototyping the climber, and finished it! The programming team completed the climber code and started to program the light and color sensors. They also finished piston code and tested it out. Design team made the…continue reading →

The Girls of Steel have once again started off strong with our first week of build season! Kickoff went great! Girls of Steel had an alum, Naoka Gunawardena, speak at kickoff and we watched the FRC Destination:Deep Space game videos! (You can watch Naoka at about 34:30 on the video.) Brainstorming for this season started immediately after the kickoff event. A few of our alums were there with us. Everyone was extremely excited for the upcoming six weeks! All girls are now preparing to compete and creating the best competition robot. The girls…continue reading →