Our 7th through 12th grade program is our largest and main program we run at Girls of Steel Robotics. It’s designed to give students a full engineering experience starting from conceptual design of a robot and going all the way through production, testing, and finally using the robot in competition! There is no expectation of prior experience, we can take students with no knowledge of bots, tools, or design and work with them to build up those skills.
Learn more about the specifics of our program below.
Timeline
This program starts around the end of August and goes through February-April (depending on dates of competitions, advancement, and what part of the program students land on in the end).
For the 2025-2026 year, orientation day is Tuesday, August 26th.
Hours
In the past, we’ve been open multiple evenings per week, along with Saturday, and allowing students to come in when their schedule allows to come work on the tasks for their subteams or crews. We expect students to average about 6 hours a week (usually about two days a week) but they’re able to come everyday if they want! If students are admitted into the FRC program, we typically expect more hours from them as the timeline to complete that robot is more intense.
Once the 2025-2026 season starts, we’re expecting to keep the same hours of Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 5pm until 9pm and Saturday from 9am until 4pm.
What do students do?
During our meetings, our students are doing a lot! On the technical side, it can range from:
- Prototyping or fabricating parts with cardboard, metal, rubber bands, and other materials
- Using our machine shop (including power tools, CNC mill, and 3D printers) to fabricate parts
- Wiring robot electronics
- Programming code to operate the robot or allow the robot to work autonomously
- Using CAD to model our bots on computers
On the business side of things, you can find our students doing things like:
- Working on budgets and ordering parts the team needs
- Reaching out to local schools and communities to offer outreach programs
- Writing presentations and documents for the public or for awards
- Talking to local government officials and advocating for local STEM needs or advocating for more support for women in STEM careers
- Planning activities to help increase team bonding
- Sewing team flags, using the Cricut for logos for robots, or making buttons
How do students learn these skills?
Over the summer, the mentors and student leaders work hard to plan workshops to teach students skills once the season starts. These range from basic shop safety to advanced things like 3D motion planning programming libraries! Students are required to attend some workshops (like shop safety and machine shop tool usage) but others are optional. They can attend whatever ones they want!
How do the competitions work?
Scrimmages (practice competitions) start around December, and we’ll enter the students into those to start to get practice and experience in what the real events will look like.
For the 2025-2026 season, we expect the FTC program to have scrimmages in December and January, and competitions in February. There may be ones in January as well.
If students are admitted to our FRC program, we will have one scrimmage in mid-February, and will have two competitions sometime between February and April.
For all scrimmages and competitions, we would like as many students as possible to attend. Even if the students aren’t directly competing, we need students to help repair the robot, talk to other teams and develop strategies, and watch matches to gather statistics on what the teams are doing. Events typically start between 7-9am and go until 5-7pm.
How do students earn their way into the FRC program?
Our FRC program is a more intense program with tighter timelines and requires a lot of collaboration with teammates. It’s also more expensive. As such, we want to ensure students admitted into the program are able to help the team as much as possible as well as get the most out of the opportunity.
Throughout the fall, we offer a variety of learning opportunities that students can take advantage of. In addition, students should work on their FTC bots and with their crews to put their learning into action. We also look at attendance and can see if regular attendance (and excess absences discussed with mentors first) meets with expectations. If students are showing aptitude, safety, collaboration with team members, and other criteria, we’ll offer the opportunity for students to join the FRC team.
How can parents know what’s happening?
We encourage parents to drop by and see what students are working on! The mentors are happy to help explain what’s happening, or even better sometimes get demos from students!
While parents can stay around during the meeting, it may get incredibly noisy and we don’t have a lot of comfortable spaces to hang out. Many parents head to Bakery Square, a nearby library, or take care of errands.
Starting the 2025-2026 season, we expect to have a parent portal where we can send updates, parents can check fee balances and pay online, and update any information that’s on file with us.
How do we apply?
Check out our Apply page! We will post applications there when we’re ready to accept students. We also post on our newsletter and social media when we open.