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 at the beginning of July and goes through approximately 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 was Tuesday, August 26th but will be earlier next year.
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 two days a week for our less intensive program and three-to-four days a week for our more intensive program, but they’re able to come everyday if they want!
Our hours may change slightly for the 2026-2027 season.
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 any workshop 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 2026-2027 season, we expect the FIRST Tech Challenge program to have scrimmages in December and January, and competitions in February. There may be scrimmages in January as well.
We expect the FIRST Robotics Competition program to 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 decide to join FTC or FRC?
We are changing our program slightly this year, and want students to choose based on their preferred way of working, or their after-school activity involvement:
- If they desire a more laid-back, longer deadline season, or they plan to be involved in a variety of after-school activities, they should choose our FIRST Tech Challenge teams.
- If they desire a more intense, faster iteration season, and they plan for robotics to be their primary focus, they can choose our FIRST Robotics Competition team.
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. Students should immediately put their learning into action with their teammates. We also look at attendance and can see if regular attendance (and excess absences discussed with lead mentors first) meets the team’s expectations. They also will be expected to be involved in the team’s outreach activities.
If they join a program and can’t meet the team’s expected attendance, contributions, or outreach, they won’t be allowed to join the team at competitions.
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 2026-2027 season, we have a Girls of Steel Portal where we can send updates, parents can check fee balances and pay online, and update any information that’s on file with us. Parents can also check in on the details of their student too.
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.