This is the second time we have been involved in this event. 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.

This is the second time we were involved with this event. On April 25th, 2019 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.

At the beginning of this season, we were contacted by one of our sponsors, Apple Valley Middle School of STEM about an FTC team that they had who was completely new. They were an all-girls team of which a few had prior experience on FLL but none had FTC experience. AVMSS’s robotics program only has one supervisor for four teams (the other three of which had experience), however, and this meant that they would not be able to provide adequate support in order to help them grow so they contacted us. Our team had decided it was quite important to mentor them both as a way to help them learn and to provide support for them to continue in STEM and robotics. We currently meet with them during the majority of their meeting days which typically are on Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:40-4:30.

The STEM club is an activity we do monthly at the Dakota County Library-Galaxie, where we teach STEM topics to foster children. The ages of the foster children range from three years olds to fifteen-year-olds. Topics we have taught include Earth Science and Astronomy. What we do in these events include having a presentation made to teach about the STEM topic, while also have activities and short quizzes in the presentation. The foster children often leave with an object that was constructed and a smile on their face.

Echo Park Elementary​

February 21, 2019, the Iron Maidens went to Echo Park Elem. and took part in their STEM Night. The purpose of this event was to introduce robotics to elementary school students. We were able to accomplish this by interacting with children that were interested in robotics and we also let them drive our robot and spheros. By introducing FIRST to students we also had to introduce Lego League Junior and Lego League to parents that were interested in having their child/children in robotics.

Cedar Park Elementary

October 24, 2019, the Iron Maidens went to Cedar Park Elem. and took part in their STEM Night. The purpose of this event was to show multiple stem activities, therefore we let students drive our demo robot, a Shero, and an Olly. our goal was to get the older elementary school students interested in FTC since the fifth graders will be going to VMSS and the Iron Maidens work closely to VMSS.

Info night is an event for Apple valley FTC & FRC teams to recruit new members. We send out invitations to families whose children are interested in STEM. We present about what FIRST is, what exactly student members can do on their teams, competitions, challenges, and about all the Apple Valley teams.

On August 30, 2019, we had a demo at the Minnesota State Fair. During this time we showed what our competition robot was capable of doing. We also talked to families and people who were interested in FIRST. During our introduction, we talked about what our game challenge was and what we have a built-in order to complete the tasks for the game challenge. During this time we also talked about the differences in FTC and FRC, in the game challenge, the types of robots used, the type of fields used. At the State Fair, we competed in the engineering/construction category and won second place. 

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On December 9, 2019, we had a demo at the Dakota County Galaxy Library. During this time we let foster kids drive the Ollies we brought. Once children entered our station, they became excited about robotics. The children that came to our station were of different age ranges, from 2 years old to 13 years old. Along with the foster kids came the parents who have an interest in getting their kids in robotics.

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On the 21st of September, we participated in the “Robot in two weeks” scrimmage. We let the new member build the robot as a practice robot. They used the demo robot we built last year and modified it to manual rules. This robot had an arm that was able to stack sky stones, we had an autonomous that worked well. Even though this was a practice game we won in the alliance team.

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On November 17, 2019, we had a mechanical engineer come to Valley Middle School. Travis Boesch, mechanical engineer, gave us a mechanical design review on our robot. Travis focused primarily on our intake design.

On the 22nd of April, the team visited Stratasys for design review and business review. We were able to talk to the marketing manager and the Vice president of Key Accounts and  Business Segments. They gave us information on how to present yourself to sponsors and people we impact. In addition, they gave us advice on how to keep our team going after most of the Iron Maidens members graduate. After the meeting, which lasted two hours, we were able to look at their gallery of 3D printed parts with different materials and their machines room.

On the 24th of September, we were invited to Uponor to showcase our robot to the workers of Uponor. This event happens every year and local First Tech Challenge robotics teams are invited along with other companies. This event is a chance for workers to volunteer for organizations that show up. Our goal for this was to find engineers of  Uponor to help us with design review and engineering notebook.