Girls of Steel had a very busy summer as we continued exploring STEM and sharing it with our community. Here are our highlights: Feiyue Our Feiyue summer camp, partnered with Carnegie Mellon University, came back after a hiatus due to the pandemic! Alongside another FRC team, 4467 Titanium Titans, we taught 17 high school students from China about all the basics of robotics and the FIRST Robotics Competition using many prototyping challenges, already-built robots to program, and many other activities to learn wiring, building, and machine shop skills. By the end, we had…continue reading →

Our second regional was the Greater Pittsburgh Regional (GPR) held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. Our team had a lot of fun and there were many highlights along the way. The regional spanned for three days: April 6, 7, and 8. The first day consisted of practice matches to get used to the field and get to know other teams; it was awesome, going significantly smoother than the first day at MVR. Also on the first day we hosted a FIRST Ladies panel where we got to hear from…continue reading →

  The Girls of Steel did amazing at the 2023 FIRST Miami Valley Regional in Cincinnati, Ohio. The regional spanned 3 days: Thursday, March 16th; Friday, March 17th; and Saturday, March 18th. The first day consisted of practice matches. We started off well by testing out the robot in a match setting, but then we had a significant hiccup - - our entire arm fell off the robot! It was shocking, but our amazing pit crew came to the rescue to fix it. We only had to miss one practice match that day…continue reading →

Technical Project Manager Build season was a huge learning experience with everyone. Starting with kickoff on January 7th through the design process, we initially started off with a design of six subsystems on our robot but by the end of the build season, we had condensed down to three. After building Bubbles, the first iteration of our robot, and watching it compete at our Week 0 event, we realized that we had to make a few major improvements to our robot in order for it to be competitive. So over the 3 weeks…continue reading →

On February 25th, Girls of Steel was finally able to hold their 10th Week Zero scrimmage - the first one since 2020 - after three years. Twelve teams attended the scrimmage this year. Like the last Week Zero, this year’s Week Zero took place on our practice field at Carnegie Mellon University at 6555 Penn Ave., near Pittsburgh's Bakery Square. The day started off at 9 am for our Girls of Steel volunteers who came early to help set up, check in and welcome teams, and unload robots. Thank you to Diya and…continue reading →

The Girls of Steel accomplished a lot in 2022 even though we started off the year virtually for just about all of January.  The team ended 2022 ready for the 2023 season of Charged Up which began on January 7, 2023! January  Even though CMU shut down in person meetings for January, we were excited for the Rapid React kickoff on January 8th which was the start of the FRC build season.  The Girls of Steel persisted with several weeks of build season meetings on Zoom and focused primarily on designing their robot.…continue reading →

  We started preseason on September 6th and our total preseason this year was 14 weeks long - two weeks longer than prior years.  After a successful preseason, we celebrated the end of preseason with a holiday party on December 11th and a white elephant gift exchange - and then finished up preseason meetings on December 15th with subteam review days.     Business Business Project Manager: Ashley W. Preseason has been amazing! With so many new and returning members, all of our divisions (media, outreach, finance, and awards) have been extremely successful…continue reading →

Hello there! We are the 2022-2023 Girls of Steel FTC teams, an all girls robotics team in the Pittsburgh area! (for more information, please see our last blog post if you haven’t already!) There's one more aspect of the FTC competition that we didn’t mention in our first post - autonomous! Autonomous is the first 30 seconds of a match, where the robot operates solely off previous programming (no controllers). There is a cone placed in front of the robot, and on each side of the cone, there is a different image. (see…continue reading →

This year we ran the Girls of Steel FLL Challenge program SuperPowered season  in person for the first time since 2019. After two seasons of meeting our teams on Zoom, this year was so much fun.   The program ran for 12 weeks from September 10th through December 11, 2022, with a break for Thanksgiving weekend.  The teams attended a competitive scrimmage competition on November 5th as well as the FLL championship competition on December 9 and 10, 2022. The FLL Challenge program was managed by Elise and Mahika the FLL leads –…continue reading →

Introduction: It’s hard to believe we are halfway through the 2023 preseason!  Every part of our team, from Business to Technical, has worked hard to prepare for build season.  Here’s a statement from all our leads about what we’ve accomplished so far this preseason. Business Business Project Manager: Ashley W. We have had a great start to business! Almost halfway through preseason, and everyone is making great progress! Everyone participates in business on Tuesdays, 5;30 to 8:30 pm from September - December. We’ve had so many amazing new ideas being implemented this year…continue reading →

Hello there! We are the 2022-2023 Girls of Steel FTC teams 9820 and 9821, all girls robotics teams in the Pittsburgh area sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University. We are also known as Girls of Steel Hypatia and Girls of Steel Hopper, named for famous women in STEM.    FTC stands for FIRST Tech Challenge, one of the programs offered by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology; a company that strives to inspire young people to go into STEM). This Girls of Steel program is offered to 8th and 9th graders…continue reading →

In contrast to the summers of 2020 and 2021 when we were 100% virtual, we finally got back to in-person outreach during the Summer of 2022. Read on to find out about how much fun we had this summer reaching people at outdoor events and camps,  including a camp that reached out to us in 2020 before the pandemic. Open Streets Pittsburgh with our sponsor, ARGO AI On June 26, 2022, a few members of the Girls of Steel went to the Open Streets Pittsburgh event held in the Strip District  to show…continue reading →

Well, well, well, it has been an eventful July. Hallelujah we were able to follow up EurekaFest with an eventful month filled to the brim (perhaps overflowing) with outreach, celebrations (cue Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” song), and reflection. To start the month off, the team scheduled a laser tag event in order to celebrate our InvenTeams grant and reminisce about EurekaFest. Two of our very own, Elise and Sarah, one of our amazing mentors, won the MVP for two of the matches. To be brutally honest, there was some inner team contention,…continue reading →

  It’s been a great year in FIRST Ladies! With 44 regional partner teams from 7 countries, we’ve really enjoyed connecting with ladies and supporters from around the world! Here are some highlights from our season: FIRST Ladies Game Night (December 2021) After the success of our 2020 Game Night, we decided to host another in December of 2021. It was a great way to connect in a more casual setting with other ladies in FIRST, and we quickly bonded as we laughed and played games! We started off the night with a…continue reading →

This June our team attended EurekaFest - a celebration of the 2022 InvenTeams - at MIT in Cambridge, MA to showcase the BuzzBand! We had so much fun presenting our invention to an audience and meeting the other InvenTeams.   Day 1: Monday, June 13, 2022 We started our journey bright and early at the Pittsburgh International Airport and flew to Boston where we regrouped with Grace at MIT’s McCormick Hall.  Afterwards, we were ready to take on Boston! Some of our team members even experienced the subway for the first time! We…continue reading →

Our team buzzed with productivity this May! We made an informational video about the BuzzBand for EurekaFest!  Check it out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QN9uyTPHiTg Also check out this clip of Aditi testing the BuzzBand (click on the photo). The BuzzBand app is currently in development with a super-alpha version built for Android that can turn an Artemis LED  light on and off. By next month we hope to have built and tested on at least one platform (Android/Apple). We also wrote a condensed version of our code for the BuzzBand. The previous issues with…continue reading →

WORLDS! Ofter qualifying for 2022 Worlds at both GPR and Buckeye, our team quickly made plans to travel to Houston -for our robot and for our team.  Generally the team reserves a bus for team trips, but Houston is far enough away from Pittsburgh (more than 1300 miles) that we arranged to fly. To get to Houston, the team split into two groups, where some members, mentors, and chaperones flew on Tuesday, April 19th, and the rest flew on Wednesday, April 20th. The group that left on Tuesday got to go to NASA's…continue reading →

This April has had us buzzing with excitement! On April 6th, we had our first BuzzBand outreach event.  We set up a booth at the Carnegie Science Center’s 18+ Sensory Sensitive Evening with a couple of our prototypes, posters and bee pins!  Many families showed interest and gave positive feedback on how the BuzzBand would work for their needs.  We are so grateful to the Carnegie Science Center and everyone that participated. Our team is already working on analyzing and applying the feedback.   From April 20th-23th we took BuzzBand to the FIRST…continue reading →

Happy Spring!        The BuzzBand team had an exciting month. We kicked off March with a presentation for Pennsylvania U.S. Congressman Mike Doyle. He left many insightful comments about our project and even participated in our media board activity! In addition, as members of the Girls of Steel FIRST Robotics Competition team, the BuzzBand team members competed at two regional competitions - the Greater Pittsburgh Regional and the Buckeye Regional. At both competitions we discussed the BuzzBand project with multiple judges. The judges were impressed with our progress and some even…continue reading →

Following GPR (actually at GPR) our team started to brainstorm ways to make a quick turn around for Buckeye. So we went hard at work to make our robot able to shoot in the high hub, and the attempt was super successful. The team buckled down with long, intense prototyping and build sessions to adapt the robot to shoot higher. The mechanical and design team, programmers and drivers had to work together to make the last-minute modifications work. Our robot, Lightning McQueen, can now shoot cargo in the high hub nicely! At Buckeye, even…continue reading →

Last week on March 17th we held our (mostly) annual women in STEM event at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional (GPR)! After GPR was canceled the past 2 years due to COVID, we were very excited to be able to hold an in-person event once again! In 2020 we hosted a virtual panel. The video is available here. Over 50 people attended this year's GPR event, and our panelists consisted of mentors and students from teams 117 Steel Dragons (Audrey O. and Ursula B.), 3504 Girls of Steel (Amanda H. and Sarah W., mentor),…continue reading →

  Our team’s first regional of the 2022 season was the Greater Pittsburgh Regional (GPR), March 17-19, 2022; it was three jam packed days of high spirit and competitiveness. On day one of competition, there were 42 practice matches, where we participated in five of them. This was a great way to ease our team into the coming days of the qualification matches. Throughout day one, we did well with getting as much cargo as we could into the lower hub, as well as hang when we got the opportunity. We did have…continue reading →

Current Project Activities: Our team is still checking for data anomalies and reporting them to the Delphi team. One of the indicators we are now monitoring is hospital admissions. Across all of the indicators, if we come across a bug, we will comment on it in a sheet, and then have the opportunity to discuss it at our weekly meetings. As the weather becomes warmer and more people are going outside, we are seeing the numbers of COVID cases, generally, decreasing across the country.  Future Activities: In the coming months, as we expect…continue reading →

After being virtual for the month of January, we met back in person on February 5th! During February we dedicated most of our time towards the Mid-Grant Technical Review (MGTR), an in-person and broadcasted showcase on February 26th. We invited experts we’ve spoken with, parents of children on the autism spectrum, local school representatives, and our media and Lemelson-MIT contacts. MGTR was a big success!  The event consisted of a thirty minute presentation from all our members, and 90 minutes of tables for each individual subteam.  Our members showed off the BuzzBand’s progress…continue reading →

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…continue reading →