Girl Scout Event

On March 1st, 2020 the Iron Maidens and Can of Beam held a girls gout event where we taught the girls about the engineering design process, program, and about the FIRST program. This whole day event was held at Apple Valley High School form 11:30 am - 5:30 pm. We had a variety of ages of scouts and got to teach quite a bit about how robotics works.

American Heart Association

In November 2020, we were the top award winner of a $1,000 grant in the American Heart Association’s Advancing Sciences Grant for Minnesota high schools to establish or enhance their STEAM program. We submitted a 4-minute video highlighting the outreach that Iron Maidens has performed over the past few years. The judging criteria were based on the potential to have a significant impact on a school or program. The video went through all of our outreach-related accomplishments and is now available on our website.

Cohorts

In October 2020, we participated in cohorts. We got together with other teams over zoom and helped each other. We talked about robot design, and some refs came in so we could ask questions.  We appreciated the opportunity to grow as a team especially during these challenging times.

Presentations at Kickoff

We presented two sessions at the FTC kickoff on September 12th, 2020. The first session was “Advice for creating a better engineering notebook” and the second was on “FMEA - Failure Mode Effects Analysis. FMEA helps identify areas that could fail and how to mitigate those issues. It also helps you identify why something failed and how to come up with solutions to improve.

Meeting with Chain Reaction

On February 18, 2021, we had a meeting with FTC Chain Reaction, who reached out to us, where we talked about how to improve our robot design process and we helped them out with how to start a connection with a business for outreach. We both gained insight and learned from this meeting. We rethought how we would approach our state robot by making sure we thought about how everything interacts with each other. 

Robot in Two Weeks

On the 25th of September 2020, we participated in a virtual version of Robot in Two weeks. During this competition, our rookies got good hands-on experiences building and coding. We scavenged parts from our previous years’ demo bot. We used the drive train and adapted certain parts to best suit its new goal. Our autonomous could have been much better but tele-op got us a few points. What we also learned from this experience was that our current pulley method wasn’t very efficient and for future note, we noticed that we should have many more driving practices.

Engineering Design Reviews

On February 9th, 2021, we met with John Wolf, a mechanical engineer from Seagate. We walked through our current robot design and brainstormed how we could improve the design based on issues we are currently experiencing. We talked about how friction on the rings can be causing issues with intake and how we need to know not only RPM but also the linear velocity of the wheels on our intake. John agreed to meet with us again in a few weeks.

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On February 23, 2021, we had a meeting with an engineer from Uponor, Travis Evans. We talked a lot about the idea we had for the state robot and talked through some problems that we were planning for and he pointed out some things that we missed in our design. Overall it was a very helpful design review.

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On March 24, 2021, we had a design review with Adrienne Hester. We talked a lot about what problems we could face while we were building our robot and what problems we may have during matches. We talked about how we might combat these problems by having extra parts or changing our plan if a mechanism was not working. We will definitely think more about this while moving forward on how we design our robot and making sure we have a backup plan if something does not work. We also learned about her job at Seagate and how she got to the place that she is which was very interesting and inspiring.

Notebook/Portfolio Review

On February 28th, 2020, the Iron Maidens worked with Jessica and Nathaniel to review our engineering notebook. The purpose of this event is to help our notebook be as best as possible and relay the valuable information it contains. This will be great information for the future and current seasons.

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On March 4th, 2021 we had another notebook review with Jess. She looked over our portfolio and talked about a few things that we should highlight more like outreach and repeated relationships with people and companies. We got some new ideas about what we want to highlight in the portfolio. Jess also said that we can reach out if we have any more questions about the notebook or portfolio.

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We had a full notebook review with Libby on March 11th, 2021. We talked a lot about how we should get the judges to look at our notebook from our portfolio and speeches. We also talked about how we wanted to integrate math into our notebook and our speeches and how we wanted to format them. We also discussed her job as a geologist and a lot about rocks.

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On March 18th, 2021. We met with alumina, Cori Roberts. We discussed all the changes to our notebook and portfolio and worked with her to further better our notebook. This allowed us to cut down some of the paragraphs and change heading colors for a more uniform design. She also gave us some tips on presenting. Kacee, Ali, and Gabby attended this meeting.

FMEA Review

We had an email conversation with Jack Ridel about our FMEA table. He sent us a message on February 28th, 2021 that gave us some insight into how to think about our FMEA and what it should be used for. He gave us many ideas about how we could improve the FMEA and how it could be used more in our design process.