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@rookiefirsts
We’re Alive!
Thought you could get rid of us? Ha, it’s not that easy But don’t worry dearest followers, we’ve made some updates to the site and we’ve got more rookiefirsts tips coming real soon! Hope you all like what’s coming.
Respect
Communication-Teamwork-Safety-Integrity-Inclusion-Respect
We are already at the last segment of our section on Girls of Steel principles! The last principle we’re going to talk through is respect, a key part of every aspect of our lives. Respect impacts and can significantly improve all interactions we make on a daily basis. The way we interact with each other shapes the way our team makes strides and works together. As a robotics team, connectedness and teamwork is the pinnacle of finding success.
We at Girls of Steel are fortunate to have a great group of mentors that further our knowledge and experience so much. A great part of our business and technical efforts revolves around communicating with our mentors. That is why showing respect to our mentors is so crucial. Additionally, showing respect to our peers is important in order to promote a really productive and positive team environment. That allows every member to reach her full potential and meaningfully contribute to the team. Finally, self-respect is extremely critical, even in a team setting. Being kind to yourself makes learning and experiencing so much easier and more worthwhile!
Some ways you can show respect to others include fully listening and engaging, taking constructive criticism well, understanding rationale, and being polite in speech and behavior. You can display self-respect by caring for your well-being, taking pride in your work, and not being overly critical of yourself.
Overall, respect is a fundamental and valuable principle to apply to every part of your life. We at Girls of Steel use respect to make our team the most positive and connected it can be. We hope you are all staying safe and well!
Inclusion
Communication-Teamwork-Safety-Integrity-Inclusion-Respect
Today’s Rookie FIRST segment features inclusion, a principle of Girls of Steel that got largely more impactful this past year with the new addition of our Inclusion subteam. The focus of this subteam is to encourage and foster diversity in not only Girls of Steel, but also the wider FIRST community as a whole. A prominent goal was making sure that everyone, regardless of demographics, had access to FIRST opportunities and felt welcome in the field.
In the Inclusion subteam, the girls used graphics and data to strengthen their research on representation in the FIRST community. To ensure the most inclusive environment within our team, we filled out anonymous surveys at the beginning and end of preseason that address our concerns or improvements to make the team as strong and unified as possible! Additionally, an anonymous suggestion box was always open for the team to implement if need be. Finally, one of the most effective additions to improving inclusion in Girls of Steel was through a big/little program. FTC and younger FRC girls were partnered with a more experienced FRC girl. The bigs served as resources and familiar faces to the littles; they helped guide the littles through the season, which can sometimes seem overwhelming. Every few weeks after all-hands, we had short games that we played in our big/little groups as bonding. There was also a points system to encourage interaction outside of just the meeting. Points could be gained from doing outreach together, attending GoS events together, and doing other fun activities together. This program was extremely successful in making sure younger girls felt more connected and involved in the larger team as a whole!
“Overall, the entire big/little program was a great way for FTC girls to connect with the FRC girls and feel included as one, big team.” - Harshitha, FTC
Making efforts to improve a team’s environment is key to promoting a fun and productive season. We hope you all are staying safe and healthy!
Safety
Communication-Teamwork-Safety-Integrity-Inclusion-Respect
As you probably already know, the FIRST community is incredibly saddened by the suspension of the FRC season. Girls of Steel has cancelled all its meetings for the foreseeable future and has transitioned to having online meetings as needed. Sometimes our team principles extend beyond just robotics; for example, with new circumstances, teamwork is still necessary as we support each other emotionally and keep our spirits up. Right now, the most important thing we all can do is practice safe habits to ensure everyone’s well-being.
Wash your hands regularly, for at least 20 seconds with warm water and soap.
Cough and sneeze into your elbow.
Disinfect regularly touched surfaces, like doorknobs and faucets.
Practice social distancing and limit in-person interaction.
Stay home as directed.
On a separate note, let’s discuss FRC safety protocol!
In preseason, make sure all your team members are properly shop trained by an adult mentor.
Use safety glasses whenever necessary.
Tie up long hair and remove dangling jewelry.
Make sure you know how to use all equipment before you attempt to, or seek out a mentor for help.
Make sure you are focused and not distracted when operating machinery.
Know your points of contact in case of emergency (number to call, first aid, etc.)
We hope you all practice safe habits and stay healthy during this difficult time. Support each other, we’ll all get through this together!
Integrity
Communication-Teamwork-Safety-Integrity-Inclusion-Respect
The third part of our Girls of Steel Principles segment features integrity, a quality that ties in perfectly with many of the other elements we have already talked about. Integrity essentially is doing what you say you will do. This is extremely important on a robotics team, where tasks are often divided up and individually assigned.
Integrity ties in perfectly with teamwork. Without it, teamwork really can’t work! A key idea in teamwork is people collaborating to create a final product. Integrity ensures that each person is giving her fullest and working her hardest. Also, integrity is exemplified with great communication. Sometimes things can get lost in translation or can be forgotten, and in those instances, it is difficult to own up to your tasks. That’s why communication is necessary to integrity.
A way we exhibit integrity on our team is through task lists. These show exactly who is working on what, so it is easier to contact the appropriate person. It becomes simple to communicate developments and involve more people this way!
Additionally, our team structure allows everyone to stay connected and accountable for their tasks. Though we are divided by subteam, every member of the team is aware of the developments on the robot (through meetings, Slack, and in-person).
Integrity is a pillar of a productive robotics team. Implement this in your team, and you are sure to have a more inventive season. Good luck this competition season!
Teamwork
Communication-Teamwork-Safety-Integrity-Inclusion-Respect
For the second piece in our Girls of Steel Principles segment, we wanted to address teamwork, perhaps the most crucial element to collaboratively developing a robot.
Quite simply, our team narrows down the broad idea of teamwork into an easy concept: put team success ahead of your own agenda. However, the ideal situation would be to align your individual goals with the team goals, and that way, each team member has a personal and collaborative connection to the process. This is super important to ensure the team’s success as a whole!
Every member of the team should be willing to work together in pursuit of the best solution. Put your best ideas out there, but don’t feel hurt if they are modified or rejected. One of the most effective parts of teamwork is combining partial ideas of multiple people together to form one immaculate idea. Another aspect to this is that, as our team is organized in subteams, different girls tend to have different strengths or areas of expertise. Especially in this team structure, teamwork is necessary to create the best potential idea.
All members of our team are involved in the brainstorming process that takes place after the challenge is released. We all sit down and analyze the video, breaking down the point system and stages. After that, we hold another brainstorming process where we actually start designing potential mechanisms. All girls are welcome to attend, and a whole spectrum of ideas are discussed.
Teamwork is imperative in a collaborative team dynamic. By stressing the importance of this, you can ensure a more positive and innovative FIRST season!
Communication throughout Build Season
Communication-Teamwork-Safety-Integrity-Inclusion-Respect
Communication is one of the most important aspects of undergoing any task, especially building an FRC robot! We at Girls of Steel do a few things specifically to maintain transparency and communication throughout the season so everyone on the team stays up to date.
Weekly All-Hands Meetings: These mandatory meetings once a week offer the subteam leads time to debrief and share goals and accomplishments for the upcoming week. This way, every member on the team knows what is going on in all the other simultaneous subsystems even if she doesn’t personally work on it. This is super important because as time goes on, girls tend to switch around to different subsystem teams as tasks to be done are created.
Leadership Council Meetings: These meetings also happen once a week, and it’s a time for leads to report a more detailed version of the tasks they have completed and plan to complete in the upcoming week. This is a great time for questions to be asked and points to be raised. These meetings help boost accountability and understanding between various subteams. Any girl on the team can attend!
Slack: Not an uncommon aspect for FIRST teams to have, communication apps like Slack keep the entire team in the loop for various things. Attendance and progress can be tracked easily and information can be sent out very easily to all. Files, pictures, and videos are also shareable, making it simple for the whole team to view exciting new parts of the robot’s progress. One of the most exciting things 3504 likes to share out are videos of the robot driving or maneuvering for the first time!
Communication is key to having a successful build season. Stay connected and keep building!
We also post weekly update blogs on the GoS website: https://girlsofsteelrobotics.com/blog/!
The Importance of Shop and Hand Tool Training
Preseason is a great time to sharpen up your skills, especially in safety. During build season, you may be working a lot in the shop or with tools, cutting and drilling pieces for your robot. However, the machines you need to use can be dangerous if not used safely. So, it is really important to get properly educated in many areas: safety procedures, how to use various machines, handtool safety, and do’s and don’t’s of the shop. You can get trained by a mentor that works in the shop a lot.
A few reminders:
Be sure to know your point of contact in case of emergency.
Never work alone.
Make sure your clothes are safe (long pants, no sweatshirt strings, hair tied back, closed toe shoes etc.)
Wear proper protection equipment (safety glasses, gloves when needed, etc.)
Have basic working knowledge about the different machines.
Know where first aid is.
For our team, Chuck, our main shop mentor, takes groups of girls to the shop. He teaches them all the rules and procedures related to the shop and quizzes them along the way. All girls are required to go through the training each year before build season.
Machine shops and tools are incredible assets to have during build season. Train and learn so you can make full use of them. Have fun, you’ve got this!
Preseason Tips
FRC Preseason has officially begun, and many teams are already working hard with preparation and skill-building to make build season the most productive it could be. For a new rookie team, preseason can seem daunting. How can you prepare for something that is still many months away? We interviewed some girls on different FRC technical subteams about the most important piece of advice they would give to rookie teams about preseason. Based on the different areas they specialize in, each girl has separate ideas about what would make a team’s preparation successful and productive.
Claire, technical project manager: “Training the new girls is the most important part, because if we don’t, we are missing out on ⅖ of the team’s capabilities.”
Anna, mechanical team member: “Refining skills is really important because we can get rusty over summer, and we have to make sure skills are on point for build season.”
Teadora, electronics lead: “The most important part of preseason is making sure girls are trained and familiar with tools so they can use it in build season. That way they get practice, and no bad habits are formed.”
Abbey, design lead: “Preseason is perfect to learn new skills, because it is the most relaxed time to learn. It’s really good to be prepared for build season.”
Anna, business project manager: “It’s a chance to be express the business aspect of running a team, which you don’t get to do in build season.”
The Band Saw
One machine that we use a lot in the shop is the band saw. This is an upright saw that we use to cut metal, plastic, and other materials. This machine is easy to use and helps us make straight cuts quickly and efficiently. Make sure you adjust the guide post to a suitable height for your piece and move slowly enough that the piece won’t catch or have rough edges. Also be sure you use proper layout techniques with a marker and ruler or corner to create a straight line to guide your cutting. This machine helps us cut a lot of pieces we use for our robot and can hopefully help you too!
The Cold Saw
Another machine in the shop that is really important is the cold saw. If you need to cut a piece of metal relatively cleanly, the cold saw is the machine to use. It may look intimidating, but if you use it right, it is extremely safe and produces great results. After you use the machine, make sure you rinse off the piece and either file or sand it down to get rid of any sharp edges. We use this machine very often to make modifications or to build. It’s a great machine to have!
Build season is nearing the final stretch! Keep working hard and have fun!
The Mill
We’re more than halfway through build season and we wanted to share with you one of the most important machines we use in the shop: The Mill!
We use the mill almost every meeting to accurately drill holes of all sizes using all different drill bits, including step drill bits! Unlike a hand drill, which needs a clamp to secure the material being drilled, the mill not only secures our material for us, but allows for unbelievable precision in measuring where to drill. We can always count on our mill and we love it for that!
We hope everyone is having a productive yet fun build season! You can do it!
Outreach Is Super Important!
First of all, it spreads the word of your team to a variety of people and places. It’s all in the name: “reaching out”! You can reach lots of people through attending or hosting various events such as robot demonstrations, chassis-building workshops, and summer camps in which you and your team spread your mission and inform others about robotics.
Spreading the word can obviously help with funding and support for your team, but a majority of outreach, in many ways, acts as volunteering, where you give back to your community and spread your mission and knowledge of robotics to those who might not otherwise have the opportunity to learn about it. Outreach is a fundamental part of any FIRST team, and a necessary aspect to succeeding not only as a team but as an organization in a larger community.
There are infinite approaches to outreach, and our team has participated in it through building a chassis kit where people of all ages and robotics experience can construct the chassis in a under two hours. We’ve also spoken at tech nights and have led forums and other opportunities to provide others, especially younger generations, with the knowledge, confidence, and team building skills, necessary to succeed not just in the STEM field but in life!
These are just some ways your team can take their first steps to participating in outreach. So to sum it, outreach is a fundamental part of any well-rounded team, and it is paramount that you seriously consider how you can spread your team’s mission and include the surrounding community in your knowledge and progress for the future!!!!
As an all-girls team, we use outreach to counteract the “leaky pipeline,” the concept that as girls progress through school, they are discouraged from continuing in STEM. In order to keep girls interested, we created a pipeline to ensure that girls continue their pursuit of STEM throughout their school career.
Thanks everyone!
Please feel free to take a look at our Outreach Page:
http://girlsofsteelrobotics.com/outreach/
And our Pipeline Presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15TTbcUb8nlabhVfN85yihdkFICkez_cBn3k7SIVrJUE/edit#slide=id.p9
New FIRST Members: Don’t Feel Overwhelmed!
The FRC preseason is now under way and for all of those new FIRST members out there who may feel confused or overwhelmed, don’t worry! It is perfectly fine to know next to nothing about robotics when you first join! Everyone feels in over their head at first, but if you stay positive and are willing to learn, you will catch on quickly. Make sure you use preseason to ask as many questions and learn as much as possible, because the more information and experience you get in preseason, the easier and more fun build season will be! Remember that mistakes are completely fine and should be expected, but if you learn from them and stay positive, you will have an amazing FIRST experience! Here are some tips from our teammates. Good luck! Sofia - “Make sure you make good use of preseason so that you have a good foundation and solid understanding of what your goals are and how you will accomplish them.” Lauren - “Remember that mistakes are ok. Everyone should expect to make mistakes and face challenges but through learning from your mistakes, using teamwork, and projecting positivity, solutions can be found and implemented.” Eve - “You never stop learning and it’s ok to not know anything about robotics at first because it leaves a ton of room to grow!”
Check out the FRC Survival Guide!
The FRC Survival Guide is a very helpful resource if you have any questions regarding robotics teams, individual goals of the teams, and strategies. It’s almost a cheat sheet, that can answer any type of question you could possibly have regarding being on a robotics team. There is so much information that is well organized under specific categories.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_GkgPlS-uKQWlNENlMzQXdlZk80MjVhX2RIMnpJcTFMZGtJ/view
How to Balance Robotics With Your Life
Being a first-year rookie on the Girls of Steel Robotics team can seem challenging at first. Juggling school, friends, homework, parents, sports, social life, sleep, etc. coupled with robotics is a lot of responsibility, and can cause a LOT of stress. You may feel like you’re drowning and not getting enough sleep, but you can balance robotics into your life. Go to http://www.frcnation.com/feed/2017/2/12/ziz6x8he2vdvxxisnaxyok3zraygz1 to learn how to make your life easier with robotics, and in general. Personally, I found this information very useful and have incorporated in into my life. It has helped me immensely and made being on the Girls of Steel team for the 3rd year much easier to balance.
Another great presentation from the FRC tCATs 5526 from Torreon, Mexico and this one is about the Rookie All-Star Award! Again, they’re starting a great program in Mexico called “Mujer FIRST” to get more women involved in STEM! If you wanna check them out, go here!
Sarah S. from the Girls of Steel and as always: