This past week was the first official week of build season for the Girls of Steel and we are off to a great start. Now, the high school girls are required to come to GoS for an average 10 hours a week, for the next 6 weeks. For kickoff, January 7th, the team was invited to Beattie Tech to watch the game reveal video. Upon seeing how the field has changed and the innovative game pieces, the girls got super excited! After a quick brainstorming session at Beattie, everyone reconvened at CMU for our team’s brainstorming session. Many different methods (and hats) were used to determine a couple sketches of potential robots that were finally set aside for the Design/Leadership meeting that Sunday. At said meeting, the council decided the priorities that the robot would accomplish in the game and made plans for the weeks to come.
We began the week with a meeting on Monday, where all sub teams started working vigorously on their tasks for the robot. During build season there is no business time, so the whole time is dedicated to building. On Tuesday, the one mandatory, all-hands meeting of the week, we discussed many important things for the build season, including our main goals. We went over some important announcements and upcoming outreach events, and got an update from the FTC girls who are still doing great! Plus we heard about our latest fundraiser with Pittsburgh Popcorn Company. Here’s the order form and flyer. Orders are due January 24th.
After FTC was dismissed, we then discussed the prototyping plan for the team, and lastly, George spoke to us about core values and remembering those values throughout build season. After the meeting, we went to build! Electronic girls worked on the E-board and some of the new girls learned to solder and mechanical girls continued to build parts for the prototypes.
The next meeting of the week was on Thursday, where the girls had three hours and went straight to work. The programming girls set up the subsystems and did a little autonomous work, the mechanical girls continued to prototype mechanisms and build the chassis, and the electronics girls added some last touches and attached some final things to the E-board. Finally, on Saturday many girls arrived as early as 9 am and got working immediately. The electronics team organized all of the wires on the board, got a lesson from programming about talons, and then helped other subteams wit their tasks. Mechanical and design both worked on the prototype and fixing errors that were made on the parts. Lastly, programming worked on camera vision, and looked at a thing called “BuildAnAuton” from FRC team 834. Overall, week one of build season went very well and everyone needs to keep working hard! We’ve got five more to go! Click here for the latest 5AwesomeRobots video.
Other happenings during week 1:
Our three FLL teams competed at the western Pennsylvania FLL Championships at LaRoche College on January 6th and 7th. Many of our high school girls volunteered to mentor the FLL kids at the competition, missing either the kickoff at Beattie or brainstorming at CMU or both. That’s dedication! The FLL teams did great, winning 2 awards in the Open Division. FLL team 18137, The Green Gears, received a 2nd place Research award and FLL team 4212, Dot Dot Dot, received a 1st place Gracious Professionalism award. FLL team 2641, CM Blues, competed well, too. Judges comments about their research presentation included, “Great enthusiasm and confidence!
Our FTC team 9820, Girls of Steel Juniors, competed at the Southwestern PA Qualifying Competition at Upper St. Clair High School on January 14, 2017. The GoS Juniors, being mainly a rookie team, did exceptionally well for their first FTC qualifying competition. Being fifth in the qualification matches and captains for the fourth alliance in the semifinals, GoS Juniors and its alliance worked together to tackle each aspect of the competition, from shooting particles into the vortex to changing beacons. For the semifinals, GoS Juniors, Radical Six, and Broken Image Link had a blast competing together! After their upcoming wrap-up meeting, the junior members will shadow the FRC girls during the build season.
