Girls of Steel FIRST LEGO League Projects – RePLAY Our four virtual FIRST LEGO teams (37 boys and girls in grades 4 to 7) met once a week from September 19 until Demo Day on December 12, 2020. They wanted to share with you highlights of their RePLAY innovation projects.  Their challenge was to choose a problem and then propose a solution to increase the activity level of people.  Each team selected a different problem.  We had a virtual meeting with an expert in the field of physical fitness.  We met with…continue reading →

On Friday, December 4, 2020, the FIRST Ladies subteam hosted a Game Night!  There were 26 attendees from 7 different FIRST teams, including FRC 78, 117, 2177, 3504, 3654, 4467 and FTC 9821.  Aeryn A. and Samhita G., the co-directors of FIRST Ladies, ran the event.  For the past three years we have hosted a Movie Night, but this year we changed it up and tried virtual Game Night! They kicked the night off with an introduction to FIRST Ladies and a Women in STEM Kahoot.  Then, everyone split up into four breakout…continue reading →

During the offseason, Girls of Steel worked to reorganize the structure of the business and tech subteams.  Read more about it here.  We are working hard to adapt to the challenge of adjusting to all-virtual preseason meetings.  Each subteam is still hard at work, and has found ways to adapt to all the changes this year.  Here is a quick summary of what each business and technical subteam is accomplishing so far this preseason. Business Subteams Advocacy: Advocacy is a new subteam this year! Subteam members have been working on planning a team-wide…continue reading →

We started off the Ultimate Goal season knowing that we would be meeting virtually at least through December 2020 and for the foreseeable future after that.  Our first meeting was an introduction to Canvas and Zoom.  Canvas is Carnegie Mellon's online learning platform. We log in to the Girls of Steel Robotics course on Canvas and then find our Zoom meetings on the calendar.  We work with 4 fabulous mentors: Maggie and Somadatta, FRC girls who are the FTC Liaisons, along with Michelle, a senior in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and Sarah,…continue reading →

  This season’s game for FIRST LEGO League is called RePLAY and it is focused on promoting exercise in the community. This year due to COVID-19, the students participate at Carnegie Mellon University using Zoom through Canvas.  Also due to COVID-19 and the lack of access to our robotics kits, we are placing a greater emphasis on the innovative research projects. For their projects, the students must devise a solution to a problem of their choosing that relates to wellness and exercise.  We meet every Saturday on Zoom from 2 to 4 pm. …continue reading →

This year we are continuing to host amazing female role models for Girls of Steel.  Past speakers include Julia Parsons, WWII codebreaker; Carnegie Mellon University Professors Henny Admoni and Jessica Hodgins; PPG executive Rebecca Liebert, and Leanne Meyer, the Executive Director of the Accelerate Leadership Center at the Tepper School of Business and Program Director of the Carnegie Mellon Leadership and Negotiation Academy for Women.  On Tuesday, October 20th, Girls of Steel had the incredible opportunity to welcome Ms. Karen Orton, a Robotics Software Engineer at IAM Robotics, a robotics startup in Pittsburgh…continue reading →

Before the Covid 19 pandemic, we offered robot workshops and robot demos on a regular basis as part of our community outreach.  With in-person outreach suspended since early March 2020, we have offered virtual outreach activities such as our FLL Jr,  Girls of Steel Expo, FLL Camp, Introduction to Scratch Workshop, and FLL teams.  With goals to improve our future in-person outreach activities,  a group of girls on the team worked on technical projects this past summer creating a NEW outreach bot and a redesign of the outreach chassis project. The technical goals…continue reading →

Throughout the COVID-19 quarantine, Girls of Steel has been working virtually to follow our mantra of “always improve” by reflecting on all aspects of the team and determining how we can better ourselves in the 2020-2021 season of FIRST: Game Changers.  One of the biggest improvements being made to the team this year is the business and technical restructuring initiative, designed to better serve our members who have both business and technical roles. The business side of improvements started at the end of the 2019-2020 build season, and the technical side only a…continue reading →

In light of the social distances guidelines imposed by the COVID 19 pandemic, many activities and summer plans had unfortunately been indefinitely postponed or suspended.  Seeing that there was an overwhelming number of students interested in participating in our virtual summer robotics programs, the Girls of Steel hosted its first virtual “Introduction to Scratch” workshop, a two-week long program that focused on building the fundamentals of Scratch block programming.  12 Girls of Steel mentors and 58 participants registered to collaborate through Zoom  to explore Scratch- learning block programming, creating projects, and enhancing presentation…continue reading →

  The 2020 FLL Workshop was the first time that Girls of Steel hosted and ran a free virtual summer camp. Nine Girls of Steel mentors and 53 grade 4 to 8 students participated at the camp.  Through different Zoom functions over the week the students learned the basics of Scratch-based EV3 programming, discovered reverse engineering, and completed a research project that proposed a solution to the RePlay challenge topic "find a problem related to people not being active enough and research and propose a solution to that problem." Before camp started we…continue reading →

We had the privilege to talk to Ayana Ledford on June 1st via Zoom. She is the Director of Diversity and Inclusion in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, which makes her the perfect person to help guide the Girls of Steel for its 11th year and kick off the renamed Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) subteam. Before the meeting, we sent her multiple questions to answer during the Zoom call. The questions ranged from how she got to where she is now, what interests her in DEI, and what challenges come…continue reading →

"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…continue reading →

It has been about a month since FIRST suspended the 2020 Infinite Recharge Season, and since then we have been busy! Just like FRC teams across the world, our competition season was affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Before the season suspension, we had planned to attend a Week 4 competition, the Greater Pittsburgh Regional (GPR). We were disappointed when it was announced that GPR would be postponed, but we also knew that we needed to use our platform to support other FRC teams and provide forums for communication and collaboration. Our solution was…continue reading →

To help team members to keep in contact during COVID-19, one of our mentors, Austin, set up a 24/7 Zoom chat room. After taking advantage of the chatroom late one night, a group of girls was inspired to plan a team bonding event where they took the literal definition of the Zoom room’s 24-hour capabilities to heart. Thus, the Girls of Steel 24-hour Zoom Marathon began. The rules were simple: at least two people must be on the call at all times. To spice up the event, girls and mentors were encouraged to…continue reading →

On March 26, 2020 Girls of Steel hosted a FIRST Ladies event: a Women in STEM Panel Webinar on Zoom. We originally wanted to hold this event in person at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic the event was postponed. We decided that we still wanted to hold the event, so we invited the panelists and guests to join us online.  People pre-registered and submitted their questions. Participants ranged from elementary students to adults from about 20 different FLL, FTC, and FRC teams. On the day of the webinar,…continue reading →

We were deeply saddened by the news that the 2019-2020 FIRST season had been suspended, but at our last Leadership Council meeting, conducted virtually on March 14, the conversation had an uplifting tone. Even though the suspension and social distancing measures connected to the COVID-19 outbreak meant big changes for our team and community, it also has provided us with the perfect opportunity to reflect on how we can improve our team over the next couple of months. This situation has challenged us to assess how we can effectively stay connected as a…continue reading →

  Girls of Steel attended the Week 1 competition Miami Valley Regional, February 27-29, 2020,  in Dayton, Ohio, and it was a huge success for the team! All of the girls had an amazing time throughout the weekend! And although we did not make it through alliance selection or receive awards, the team was able to make a great deal of progress to prepare for our next competition, the Greater Pittsburgh Regional at California University of PA, now postponed to a future date. Technical wise, the robot did very well considering certain aspects…continue reading →

On February 15th, 2020, Girls of Steel hosted eight other FRC teams at our annual Week Zero Scrimmage. This year it was held at our new practice facility at CMU on Penn Avenue near Bakery Square.  This was our 9th year running a Week Zero event!   The day started at 10:00 AM, with teams being welcomed into our new practice field space at Carnegie Mellon by Girls of Steel members. Teams could set up around the field and make adjustments to their robots before practice matches started at 11:00 AM. We broke…continue reading →

Our last official week of build season was incredibly busy, with amazing progress being made on every aspect of the robot. Though we did not completely finish the robot, we still have few intense meetings left to fix and finalize our bots, Europa and Callisto. The end of week 6 concluded with our Week Zero Scrimmage, which we will be posting about soon!  The shooter subteam was very busy, between completing Rev1 of the robot for the scrimmage and almost finishing Rev2. The shooter hood was able to be fabricated using the CNC…continue reading →

Week five of build season started off and ended strong, and our whole team is getting more and more excited as we get to see serious progress made on our robots and attachments! We decided on the names for our competition and practice robots. Our final decision was to name our competition robot Europa, and our practice robot Callisto.  Our main goal is to have both robots finished as soon as possible so we can start practicing with all the components, and so the programming team can get started with troubleshooting. Programming has…continue reading →

Coming out of week three, there was a lot of work to be done, and throughout week four, the team was able to handle it well! Stress management came into play and everyone was able to keep a level head and accomplish a lot. We are working towards having a complete first robot soon, and it looks like we are set up to be getting that done in time. Mechanical is split into their subteams, and each had a lot to finish so that it could be assembled soon. The winch system idea…continue reading →

This past March, Girls of Steel (GoS), along with Carnegie Mellon University, had the honor of hosting author and engineering leader Pratima Gluckman who traveled from California to visit  for several events, including our Greater Pittsburgh Regional FIRST Ladies Meetup! The experience was extremely influential on GoS and FIRST community members, as she inspired us to be strong and pursue our dreams. On March 20, 2019, Pratima met with members of Women@SCS during lunch, and later spoke with GoS members at a special team meeting about her journey to becoming a leader at…continue reading →

Girls of Steel has had a successful two weeks of build season so far, but going into this third week there was a lot to continue doing! Something that the team needed to keep in mind this week was how quickly build season is moving on. The first few weeks always feel like there is so much time left, but we have quickly realized that there is, in fact, still limited time to complete everything. For this reason, Girls of Steel is trying to keep moving as efficiently as possible.  Also, our FTC…continue reading →

    HYPATIA: Team 9820, Girls of Steel Hypatia finished the season off strong by coming in 13th place at the Southwestern PA qualifier on January 11th. At the beginning of the day, after passing inspections, three of our team members went out and scouted. From the last competition, we learned that it is vital to make your team's name known amongst the other teams. However, it was very hard to keep our name separated from our sister teams, Hopper and Lovelace. Every time we would try and make our presence known with…continue reading →

  Week 2 was a jam-packed week full of prototyping, assembling, and testing. This week, the team had 4 meetings: Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. All of the subteams had a productive, engaging, and successful set of meetings. Week 1’s goal featured finishing the chassis, however this task extended into Week 2 and the chassis was drivable by the end of the week. The chassis and control panel subteam faced numerous problems that they worked to identify and solve throughout the week’s meetings. The chassis’ CAD assembly is built, and the plates have…continue reading →