“Class made me think about using LEGOs and everyday things in a new way and it helped expand my brain and imagination to try new things and make things work. It was amazing working with everyone and seeing all their creations. Thank you for teaching us and helping us learn, it was a lot of fun. ” – Imogen, age 9.

As everyone knows, the world has come to a stop due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Girls of Steel refused to stop making an impact in our community. Under normal circumstances, Girls of Steel members would be running FIRST® LEGO® League Junior teams at Pittsburgh area schools. Many of the girls on the team look forward to running the program, so it was heartbreaking for us to miss running it in person. It was, however, a great opportunity for the team to work together and demonstrate our care for the young students that would be missing out by creating the next best option, a virtual program!

Girls of Steel developed a fully functional virtual program within just a few weeks. The planning started in the middle of April and registration was sent out on April 28th with a registration deadline of May 5th. We got in contact with FIRST, who shared the materials for the regularly scheduled program. We used the Engineering Notebook and Team Meeting Guide that FIRST sent us as a model for the Virtual Engineering Notebook and Virtual Team Meeting Guide. These materials were created using Canva, and were modified versions of FIRST’s materials, but were not created in partnership with FIRST.  We ran the program from May 10 to June 13, 2020. One hundred six families registered for our virtual program – fifty families joined us on Carnegie Mellon’s Canvas platform and weekly Zoom meetings and fifty-five families chose to use the materials we sent according to a different schedule.

We modified them so that every family would be able to participate, no matter what materials or resources they had. To do this, every activity that the program had was based around using household materials, like office supplies or recycling. It was heavily stressed that the children could use anything that they wanted to complete the activities. In addition to these materials, girls on the team also created instructional videos that the children could watch and follow along too if they weren’t yet able to read or just preferred watching videos. A special thanks to all of the girls that filmed for the videos! Thank you so much to Emma, Alex, Gigi, Elizabeth, Cam, Justina, Aditi, Maya, Samhita, and Susanna. Also a thank you to Meghna who created the starting and ending cards for the videos and our mentor, Dr. Richards, who supported the creation of this program and assisted in making it a reality! The videos turned out amazing thanks to everyone that helped out! They were also useful to the children and provided step by step instruction so that the activities would be easy to accomplish even without an adult present to help out. 

The idea was that the Virtual Team Meeting Guide would be for an adult to use, and the activity videos would be a good substitute in cases where there was no adult available. The videos, however, also included demonstrations of ideas for what to build as well as fun warm ups such as a virtual handshake! We also hope that the videos provided some personal interaction for the children since we unfortunately could not work together in person throughout the activities like we normally would.  Here’s a link to all the materials that were available to the families.  We are considering running the program again, so please contact us at girlsofsteelroboticsfll@gmail.com if you’re interested in participating in this or other Girls of Steel programs.

Another way that we were able to form a personal connection to the children and families was through our weekly Zoom calls on Saturday afternoons! There were five calls throughout the program. They gave us a chance to meet the children, talk to them about what they learned, and see their amazing creations!

We did warm up activities such as completing our handshake that they made at home and reading a story book called Iggy Peck Architect by Andrea Beaty. There is also a Zoom feature where the host can create a poll, we used this to make a few polls where the kids could answer a fun question about the program. It was a great way for them to engage! Plus we found out they really liked the building projects and the Zoom calls! 

The engagement from the children was incredible! Not only did we see them working together and practicing the Core Values in the Zoom calls by them using the chat to talk to us and each other, but we also received so many pictures and videos of their creations through our email. All of the kids were so creative and innovative throughout the program and it was clear that they learned so much from their experience. It was great to hear them talk about what it means to be an architect and engineer, as well as tell us about how they worked through challenges while building and designing.

We hope that this inspired all of the children who participated to continue to pursue STEM and showed them that learning can be fun as well as a great way to express their creativity!

“I enjoyed the time learning with the FLL Jr program. I enjoyed learning more about creativity, exploration and hands-on problem solving. I had a blast with hands-on challenges and having fun with LEGO and everyday materials to solve real-world problems. I explored new areas like power mills, durability, blue prints and architecture.” Zoey, age 8.