Our team connected with Million Women Mentors to organize a summit to gather young women to discuss how to promote STEM among women and how to organize potential solutions to doing so. We originally reached out to Tonya from Million Women Mentors at the beginning of the season as their Minnesota chapter needs help promoting them. Our plan included using the Million Women Mentors network to find women in STEM interested in mentoring robotics teams. While on our end since there are always kids interested in robotics that can’t find mentors we would connect them. This summit is potentially a way to do that, but also to investigate ways to get girls interested in STEM.​ Our team took the time to create this documentation of how we are beginning to expand the event. Moving forward, we continue to have multiple collaboration phone calls for 2-4 hours every 2 weeks with Million Women Mentors and their intern, Calli, to determine what our goals are, and who our audience will be. Million Women Mentors is a nonprofit that tries to get more females into STEM by mentoring young females, they have achieved by mentoring over 1 MILLION females. Our goal for this event is to expand robotics to girls that do not know they have the opportunity to. This event is also being supported by Experis Engineering, Seagate, and High Tech Kids.

Every year the Iron Maidens partner with The Regal Kiwis, Attack on Robot, and our local girl scouts troop. To host an event allowing the young scouts to receive three robotics-related badges; Programming, Designing, and Showcasing Robots. This is one of the most important outreaches we do since we spend a large amount of time with young girls interested in STEM while getting them excited and informed about robotics. The event was scheduled for April 7th with 135 confirmed girl scouts attending.  

The curriculum was developed between three 3 teams from Apple Valley; Regal Kiwis, Attack on Robot and Iron Maidens, however, the Iron Maidens have been focusing on the sustainability of this event having shared it to around 3 other teams, and are planning on making this event more widespread. Which is why we posted the schedule in our notebook so people can take a look, the curriculum is also posted on our website for interested parties.

The Iron Maidens partnered with Apple Valley High School Faculty to host a breakfast event called Grit to Great, based on the book of the same title. The purpose of this event is to get women who are in careers that are not traditionally/historically occupied by women. We had women in careers that are traditionally/ historically occupied by women interacting with groups of AVHS girls in hopes that this interaction inspires more of them to consider careers in these fields. Around 100 female students from different grades attended this event. We have procured sponsorship from Uponor to provide breakfast.

The program offered the chance for students and women in careers to network, ask questions, and share stories. Cherie Browne, senior manager of project management at Uponor, was the event’s keynote speaker. The breakfast ended with a panel discussion of women representing different career fields. Each student also received a free copy of the book “Grit to Great” by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval.

On June 20th, four of our members demonstrated the robot to Seagate employees with Mustang Gear Gang at their employee picnic in Normandale. Seagate is one of our sponsors and we were able to talk to their employees more about who we are, what robotics is but also thanking them for becoming more attracted to FIRST and of course being our sponsor! During that time, we had a chance to speak to FRC teams that were also sponsored by Seagate and got to learn more about their game “Power Up.” 

On July 16th, we were invited to demonstrate Empress to our sponsor; Stratasys. We spoke to many employees about our robot but especially our iterations to our mechanisms and 3d parts that were created through our process and journey. We also explained to the Stratasys employees about what we 3d printed within the company and how much of progress we had made from the beginning of Relic Recovery and during worlds of last season.

On August 22nd, ISG“Architecture+Engineering+Environmental+Planning”, we were invited to present to them about what robotics is by showing them FTC and FRC with Knights of The Valley, Attack on Robot, and Regal Kiwis. The company is located in Bloomington, Minnesota. They multi-disciplinary firm that serves numerous markets with eight offices throughout the Midwest and clients nationwide. We had an experience of exploring what the company does and also understand how we could partner with them in the near future!

On September 14, we were invited to attend the Thomson Reuters Conference. We gave an hour long presentation on the impact FIRST has on students, after which demoing our robot to their employees. Along with Thunder Penguins, Blue Twilight, Cobalt Catalysts, and The Pride. Speaking to many employees getting them informed in FIRST.

On September 19th, Lisa was invited to Uponor with other Apple Valley teams including Knights of the Valley, Regal Kiwis, and Attack on Robot to spread the word of volunteering. This event was based on how much we want employees to volunteer for High Tech Kids or any areas in general. Uponor wants employees to be engaged and help any services that are in need and one of them is robotics by spreading the word of STEM and FIRST by simply volunteering it can make an impact with the program!

On September 26th, two members were invited to a company called MISO located in Eagan, Minnesota by Jim Lynch and other Apple Valley teams; Knights of the Valley, Regal Kiwis, Attack on Robot and also Science Olympiad. MISO is an essential link in the safe, cost-effective delivery of electric power across much of North America. They are committed to reliability, the nondiscriminatory operation of the bulk power transmission system, and to collaborating on creating cost-effective and innovative solutions for our changing industry. We demonstrated our robot and had an opportunity to learn more about their company and how we could partner in the near future.

On December 12th our team had a design review with PGC. We discussed the current problems we were having with our intake and received potential solutions to the issues of how to design it the most effectively, how to make it structurally sound, and where to place it. We also discussed issues with how our robot hung on the lander and how to fix issues regarding the lift.

On December 17th, our advisor connected us with MWM to increase more girls into STEM. Million Women Mentors are a nonprofit that try to inspire more girls to be in STEM careers by giving them a chance through mentoring. We are very lucky to have an opportunity to collaborate with MWM more and the idea that came from this collaboration was to organize a summit. This summit will encourage, not exclusively but mainly, girls from a variety of robotic teams and locations to come together in order to brainstorm ideas for outreach events to promote women in STEM. This will also allow teams to connect with MWM and gain resources and knowledge to organize future outreach events along with encouraging collaboration between teams. After this, we had three more similar planning sessions.

On December 19, we attended a meeting with Jeremy, an agile coach at Target. He talked through the agile process and how they use small sprints to develop and deliver a product quickly. We relayed how we can see how this relates to our robot build process.. Jeremy also taught us about Kanban which in Japanese means flow. Toyota developed kanban as a visual workflow of the steps of manufacturing a car. We feel it will help us organize our meetings better and help us reach our goals more quickly. We were the first FIRST Tech Challenge team that they had worked with.

On June 21st, We were invited to present at Macalester college for over 30 students during the summer and reached out to them about why they joined robotics with also their future goals continuing on with being in the FIRST community. This was hosted by Russell Fraenkel. Lisa created activities that students would need to do that were all somehow connected to STEM and FIRST. Her ideas were based on communication because she always thinks that robotics key to success is always communicating with each other.  The students would need to do activities that were all based on communication and showing that no matter how difficult things can get talking and communicating is important to a group. We also showed the students Empress and explain what the game challenge was all about as well.

In May, Echo Park Elementary School reached out to us to see if we could attend their new summer program, called “Summer Library.” in July. This summer program allowed students to come in and explore new activities, and check out books to read. Kathy attended the event with Tai from Regal Kiwis. They both showed their robot to the students and taught them about FIRST. They also discussed with the parents that were interested in getting their children into STEM. With the different types of robotics within FIRST, we discussed how their children can join FIRST Lego League Jr, and First League League.

On September 9th we hosted an informational night with the other Apple Valley robotics teams. We presented to interested middle and high schoolers about FIRST robotics and what FTC and FRC are like and what the games for each year were like. After the presentation, we showed them our robots from each team and allowed them to drive the robots around while any interested in joining a team could fill out a signup sheet. FTC at AVHS received 6 new members. The Iron Maidens took 1: Jordan.

On October 25th, during a family STEM night hosted by our local STEM elementary school. We presented to many students letting them play with our robots, spheros, and look through our game challenge. It was a great crowd, as families and children are already interested in STEM and were very receptive and excited to join robotics.

On January 31st, during one of our robotics build meetings. A family walked through our build session on their way to the exit and got interested. We quickly took the opportunity to present our team and robot to them. While also letting them have fun driving our robot and attempt to hang on landar.

On May 26th, FIRST Ladies hosted an event at the University of Minnesota specifically talking about girls being in STEM fields. Representatives presented to us about how us girls can make an impact on the STEM and FIRST community with being confident as well as going through with our passion. There were small group talks about specific topics as well as alumni talking about future colleges to stepping up for future STEM careers.

On July 26th, during a meeting, Lisa and Asiya wanted to learn more about programming so we invited Tyler from Parallax shift and Tai from Regal Kiwis to help us program and learn the basics. During the time, Lisa was able to learn about how to program the demo-robot and for the robot to intake a Wiffle ball as well. Asiya also learned the basics and more in-depth of pit loops etc. She also learned about the phones and how everything is connected and solve errors of the program for the first time.

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On July 26th, we were invited by Titanium Allies to be at a Robot Demo for a festival called Slice of Shoreview. We drove over 40 minutes to be at Slice of Shoreview. This festival was for everyone in the Shoreview community and we were able to demo our robot to children and adults but also meet teams in Shoreview as well. Not only was there FTC but there were also FRC teams that were invited.

On August 4th, three members went to the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities to present about “how to build a robot faster” and about “CAD” this event was open to every team around the area. It allows teams specifically new teams to have a better understanding of the basics of building and CADing from talking about if you can build as much as possible it is good practice to understanding the different software there is to CAD an example that we use is OnShape. We presented for everyone to have tips and tricks on these two topics. There were also other topics as well such as business, programming and general FTC subjects.

On August 11th, we were invited to Nextgen’s block party which they have asked us rather later than expected but we still went to anyways. This was a day to get to know their neighborhood and show them all about robotics and what we do as a community. There were also other teams that came along and we all got together to have a small scrimmage of relic recovery for the block party.

On August 18th we met with Mustang Gear Gang for an hour and a half at Seagate for an information-sharing session. They asked us questions about our engineering notebook and judging. They shared information about how they design and build their robots.

On September 8th, the big day arrived and that was the reveal of the 2018-2019 game challenge which was hosted at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities! We are all excited to see what the challenge would be and also getting to see some of our Iron Maiden Alumni; Cori Roberts and Marie Pena. After the reveal of Rover Ruckus, we were up for presenting about “Recruitment” although there wasn’t that many people we still had a crowd to talk about our experience with recruitment and sharing how new teams can do the same as well.

On September 22nd, Snow Problems a team at the U of M hosted a scrimmage called Robot In Two Weeks. This is a scrimmage that allows FTC teams to create a robot and play matches for fun and for practice. We created a simple robot for the new game challenge in exactly three days and competed. Overall, was picked by the first captain; Iron gears and won an award for it. This allowed us to have practice and also helping out the new members that were at the event to understand the challenge as well.

On November 11th, we visited the Eagan Qualifier to see how other teams are doing with their robot and the team itself. We also were cheering on for some teams we know at the qualifier. There were a lot of people at the qualifier also High Tech giving out mini rovers to whoever was there. We got to learn a lot about other teams, what their robot is, how they are doing, what their goals are, etc. 

On November 16th, we volunteered for High Tech Kids and also supporting the teams that were there. Asiya volunteered as being an Emcee wearing a penguin onesie and Lisa volunteered as being a queuer for the day. There were around 25 teams, going back and forth trying to queue can be difficult and emcee can be nerve-racking but in the end, volunteering for High Tech Kids give lots of opportunities to reach out and spread the word of FIRST to everyone but also having a good time!

On December 8th, we volunteered at Eden Prairie for High Tech Kids and also supporting the teams that were there. Asiya volunteered as being an FTAA and Lisa volunteered to help out as being a safety guide for the day. With over 25 teams being there, sometimes people do forget about their safety glasses and a great way for Asiya to learn and experience what it’s like to be an FTAA. The teams at the qualifier were incredible and see how well they perform is amazing to watch. 

On January 19th and 20th, we volunteered for High Tech Kids and also supporting the teams that were there. As FTAA’s both competitions, helping out teams on the competition field with any errors we might have.

On May 21st, We presented to the mayor of St.Paul about our journey from our design process to making it to worlds from last season. We explained to the mayor of how much we wanted to inspire students to join FIRST since his children also were very much interested in robotics as well. We also gave them a demonstration of Empress Steel and describing what the game challenge was all about. This also led to us discussing our priorities, goals, and why it’s important for our team to expand and stretch the word out to everyone about STEM and FIRST!