2021 The Girls of Steel Year in Review
Now that it’s 2022 and we are finally moving forward again with in-person meetings and building two (2!) robots, check out the highlights of our accomplishments from 2021. Again, Girls of Steel lived up to their reputation of representing Rosie the Riveter, delivering high quality programs to our community.
January
All the FIRST competitions for FRC were virtual this year. We participated in all three – Infinite Recharge at Home, Game Design, and Innovation Challenge. We also continued with Season 1 of Rosie Talks, holding Session 2 on January 10, 2021 along with the weekly COVIDcast team meetings every Wednesday on Zoom. We were excited to meet Helen Greiner who was our guest speaker on January 12, 2021. Finally, on January 18th, five Girls of Steel gave a virtual presentation at 2021 TRETC about their research on educational technologies used at local schools, “Students’ Perspectives on EdTech Today – This is What Works for Us.”
February
We continued to work on the three FIRST at Home challenges, hosted Rosie Talks Session 3 on February 7th, and continued our work with the COVIDcast team. In addition, we participated at the STEMGirls Summit hosted by FRC team 2468, presented at the Argo AI All-hands meeting, and met with Sam, his mom, and therapists to learn about his needs for an assistive device.
March
This month all the FIRST at Home challenges and our Chairman’s presentation were judged. We hosted Rosie Talks Session 4
on March 7th and continued our work with the COVIDcast team. The Innovation Challenge team presented their project, BuzzBand: An exercise motivator for youth with autism. The Game Design team presented their game, AppleMania. The Infinite Recharge at Home team presented updates on the design of the robot, but they did not participate in any in-person demos. Read about all the competition events in this blog post update. In addition, we participated in a virtual panel along side experts in robotics at a meeting called, “The Future of Tech in Pittsburgh.”
April
During April we awaited the results of the judging that occurred in March. We hosted Rosie Talks Session 5 on April 11th and started planning for another virtual FLL Explore program which we kicked off on April 18th. Also the Innovation Challenge continued meeting to develop the Bu
zzBand project and submitted a proposal to the Lemelson MIT InvenTeams program. TheBuzzBand team found out on April 16th that they qualified as finalists for the InvenTeams grant! We hosted a panel of FRC teams with the following panelinsts: Space Cookies FRC 1868, Team Appreciate FRC 2468, Quasics FRC 2656, SHARP FRC 3260, Metrobots FRC 3324, and Titanium Titans FRC 4467. Reviewing the COVIDcast website and discussing updates continued each week. Finally, “When You Wonder, You’re Learning” was published. We are featured in Chapter 4!
May
May was an exciting month for Girls of Steel. We finished up our FLL Explore program after six weeks, ending with Demo Day on May 23rd. As finalists for the InvenTeams grant, the BuzzBand team continued meeting. Also, the COVIDcast team continued working with the Delphi team at CMU, we submitted a video about the BuzzBand project to the 2021 PAECT 2021 PAECT Virtual Showcase, delivered a 3D printed assistive device to Sam, hosted our annual Gala, virtually again, with CMU’s VP of DEI, Wanda Heading-Grant, as our amazing guest speaker, and attended the Upper Ohio River Region virtual awards ceremony. We received the following awards:
- Game Design Challenge, Engineering Design Award
- Innovation Challenge, Semi-Finalist Award
- Dean’s List Finalist Award, Janise K.
- Regional Chairman’s Award
June
This month the BuzzBand and Chairman’s team were judged for the championship Chairman’s Award and the Innovation Challenge finalist award. Our COVIDcast team wrote a blog about their work over the past 6 months or so. We attended the Detroit Championship awards ceremony on June 26th to support our FIRST friends and with dreams of winning for Dean’s List, Chairman’s or Innovation Challenge. We were overjoyed to find out that we won a Chairman’s Finalist Award! It was so exciting to hear the announcer read what the judges had to say,
“The pandemic has tested our mettle but this finalist team was galvanized into action quickly converting to online and virtual outreach and forging more connections than ever before. By using their outreach impact document they gauged the effectiveness of their efforts and targeted the connections to meet their goals. They drew students through a full progression of FIRST in what they call their program pyramid. Sugar and spice may be nice, but these girls are made of steel. So congratulations to team 3504 the Girls of Steel from Pittsburgh PA USA!”
Read all about it here in out competition season blog post. Finally, we spent time this month planning for and preparing to attend Virtual NAC on June 30th. It was an amazing experience for everyone who participated.
July
After winning a Chairman’s Finalist Award last month, we met with recent Hall of Fame team, Green Machine FRC 1816, for a “Chairman’s Exchange.” It was a great way to learn from an experienced winning team about how to plan our next steps for the future Chairman’s competitions. This month we planned our summer camps for August, continued our COVIDcast project, applied for the 2022 Leadership Council, and received a 2022 Strong Women Strong Girls Strong Award! Aditri and Aria accepted the Strong Award on behalf of Girls of Steel and created a team video which was showcased at the awards event on July 30th.
August
August began with a bang! We ran four major outreach events: Virtual Expo, Virtual Intro to Scratch Camp, our first ever Virtual GoS Hackathon Jr, and the virtual FLL Skills Camp. Check out the Highlights of Summer Outreach blog for more information. The COVIDcast meetings continued along with the BuzzBand project team’s preparations for submitting the final InvenTeam’s application due next month.
September
This month we started the 2021-2022 preseason virtually with fingers crossed that we would be allowed to meet in person starting later in the fall. We registered FTC, FLL, and FRC teams as hybrid programs so that we could pivot to in-person meetings will all the necessary paperwork already on file at CMU. This month we kicked off the virtual FLL Challenge program on 9/25 with 4 teams, the virtual FTC program with 2 teams kicked off with an intro meeting on 9/19, and virtual FRC kicked off on 9/21 with the new girl meeting. The BuzzBand team submitted their final application for the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams grant on September 5th – they wrote a multi-faceted application that included 14 pages of background research supporting their project, and more. The COVIDcast team plans to continue meeting virtually even after we have permission to meet in-person. We had the pleasure of giving Congressman Mike Kelly a brief in-person tour of our practice field on September 17th.
October
October was another eventful month for Girls of Steel, starting with the announcement on October 4th that the BuzzBand team won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams grant. Preseason FRC meetings continued virtually along with FTC. We found out we would be able to meet in person starting on October 19. We decided to hold all our in-person FRC and FTC meetings at the practice field. FRC met in person on October 19th – first time since March 2020; FTC met in person on October 21st – first time since March 2020; and FLL Mentors and BuzzBand team met in person on October 23rd! The hybrid model for FLL used mentors in person with LEGO robots coded by students on Zoom. An FLL highlight was a guest speaker from Argo AI, Jelena Frtunikj, who talked about self-driving vehicles and transportation in general. The COVIDcast team continued meeting on Zoom every Wednesday.
November
In-person meetings continued to go well in November. We held business meetings on Zoom and tech training meetings in person. COVIDcast meetings continued on Zoom. We had amazing participation for weekly FLL mentoring on Saturday afternoons and teams made a lot of progress this month on both robot challenges and the research project. We were excited to hear from Ms. Rose Silva, our guest speaker on November 4th. We attended the annual SWATposium, hosted by FRC 771, on November 27th, virtual again in 2021, and presented a session about hosting Rosie Talks webinars.
December
At the end of the year and the end of the preseason, we reflected on our many virtual and in-person accomplishments as we listed the events of the past 11 months. Our FIRST Ladies subteam organized and hosted a virtual Game Night onDecember 10, 2021, Our FLL Teams showcased their accomplishments on Demo Day, December 18, 2021, and we kicked off Season 2 of Rosie Talks on December 19th. The pandemic is still an issue and we are helping with reporting data reviewing and reporting anomalies in indicators to make the covidcast website the best resource it can be.
