Here is update #2 from the Girls of Steel FTC teams Hypatia, Hopper, and Lovelace.

At Meeting 7, on October 30th, all of the teams finished the basic model of their chassis. We also learned how to break chains and how to attach them to our robots. The process of breaking chains and attaching them to our robots was a hard process, and we had to be careful when attaching them.

We had our first Thursday meeting on November 1st. We’re having Thursday meetings now to give us more time to work on our robots.  Fun fact: the FRC team also meets on Thursdays.  We ordered and received surgical tubing and sprockets, so that all of our teams could start to experiment on the structure of their mineral collector. We thought of two ways on how to make our collectors, but every team had a different size of sprockets that they were using.

On Tuesday, November 6, we received a lecture from Dr. Henny Admoni about the general overview of Java coding. We then learned about Java specific to FTC from Austin. We later moved on to making our markers for the scrimmage on Saturday, November 10th and working on our robots and engineering notebook.

Our last meeting before the scrimmage was on Thursday, November 8. We were all hurrying to add as many finishing touches to our robot as we could. We also worked on compiling a program for our robots autonomous period during the competition when we will not be able to drive our robot.

On Saturday, November 10, all of our teams attended the Pittsburgh Area Scrimmage at Peters Township Middle School hosted by FTC teams 8509 and 11210. We got to meet and compete against many teams from all across Pittsburgh and one team from Maryland. For the first three hours of the scrimmage we worked on our robots and attended a judging practice session. We got valuable advice from the judges on how to improve our presentation and engineering notebook.

Afterwards, we started competing in matches and recognized the strengths and weaknesses of our robots. Our robots did malfunction in several matches, but we did find a way to fix the problems with our robot. Our teams also ranked well during the competition. Hopper was ranked in 4th place, Lovelace ranked in 5th place, and Hypatia ranked in 11th place. We had a lot of fun competing, meeting other teams, and learning from our mistakes.  We’re looking forward to our first qualifier at Pitt Johnstown on Saturday, December 8th.