Feiyue – Girls of Steel Robotics

Robotics Feiyue

Feiyue is a two-week long summer camp sponsored by and held at Carnegie Mellon University’s Field Robotics Center in Pittsburgh PA USA. Girls of Steel mentors created Feiyue, developed the curriculum, recruited students from China, and invited Girls of Steel members to be TAs. We have taught about 170 Chinese students about robotics during the over seven summers (2013-2019). The program played an important role in the financial sustainability of our own team. Recently we added a section specifically designed to train new students and teachers in leading FRC teams. Each year the Feiyue students build FRC based robots to compete in off season events such as WVROX (2016 & 2018) and the Steel City Showdown (2017 & 2019). (Note: Feiyue was not run in 2020 due to COVID-19.)

One of our mentors helped organize a Shenzhen FRC Workshop and traveled to Shenzhen in November 2014. The participants in China represented over 20 teams including FRC teams #4830, #5307, #5522, #5453, #5297 and #4953. In 2016, another mentor and team member traveled back to Shenzhen to check in on Team 6414, which was formed as a direct result of the Feiyue program. Read about their trip in our blog post. In 2017 and 2018, mentors and team members traveled again to China.

“It has been a year since I paid my first visit to CMU, but the amazing experiences with you, Prof. Jason Winters, Prof. Alex Long, and those TAs from Girls of Steel have had a profound influence on me. Not only had I learned a lot about programming and mechanic design, but I had also become passionate about building robots with my team.” ~ Sandy Sun Xi wrote in an email to our mentor, George Kantor. She now speaks passionately about how Girls of Steel inspired her to go into a STEM discipline in China even though there are strong cultural biases there against women in STEM.

“Dear Professor, Good morning! I’m the girl who talked with you today and the captain of team 5297. Thank you so much for your generous help, your advice really helped us solve many questions that we felt uncertain. As a rookie team, we benefit a lot through this conversation, we will try to do the best. I also need to thank you personally because the speech you gave in our school last year made me realize that robotics is a really cool thing and what I love. I think I will choose robotics as my major and hope there’s a day I can be your student at Carnegie Mellon 🙂 Thank you for your reading and hope you have a nice day!” Sincerely, Jiahua Guo, another Feiyue student.

2019 Feiyue Camp

This year camp was held July 22 to August 3, 2019. We TA’ed 33 students from China with members of team 3260, SHARP, together leading them through a condensed version of our FRC build season to build a robot to play this years game: Destination Deep Space. The students grouped into two teams, 9989 Hurricane, and 9988 Tornado. Both teams competed alongside Girls of Steel, SHARP, and 20 other teams at the Steel City Showdown hosted at Carnegie Mellon University on August 3, 2019. Both teams did extremely well at the Showdown: 9989 joined Girls of Steel in alliance 1, and 9988 went to alliance 3. All of the students from China and the GoS and SHARP TAs had fun throughout the entire camp, and made plenty of new friends.

2018 Feiyue Camp

Feiyue was held July 23rd to August 3rd, 2018, ending with the Feiyue teams competing at the WVROX official FRC off-season event hosted by FRC 2614 in Morgantown, WV. This year 38 students attended Feiyue.

2017 Feiyue Camp

Feiyue was held July 24th to August 5th, 2017, ending with the Feiyue teams competing at the first Pittsburgh official FRC off-season event, Steel City Showdown.

2016 Feiyue Camp

Feiyue was held July 25th until August 6th, 2016. The Feiyue team was composed of 32 students from different places in China. The students this year had to design and build a robot to compete in the FIRST Stronghold game at the off-season event, WVROX, held at West Virginia University, hosted by MARS FRC 2614. The Feiyue team met at Carnegie Mellon University at the Field Robotics Center five days a week from 9 am -5 pm. The students on this team were from a diversity of grades, but mainly high school students.

The Girls of Steel hosted Feiyue because we want to spread STEM, science technology engineering and math, to as many people as possible. “It was a fun experience to interact with people from another country who had some, or no experience with robotics.” ~ Jet, Girls of Steel TA

For additional information contact us at girlsofsteelrobotics@gmail.com.