FIRST^® Community Blog | February 8, 2022

Build the Future Spotlight: Girls of Steel

February 8, 2022

Sharing STEM, Empowering Everyone

Program: FIRST Robotics Competition

Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Our FIRST ^® Robotics Competition team, Girls of Steel, are on a mission to empower everyone, especially women and girls, to believe they are capable of success in STEM. We foster an inclusive team environment, providing girls and genderqueer individuals with a community that encourages excitement for learning and initiative in a male-dominated industry.

Additionally, our mission to “empower everyone,” speaks to our ever-expanding commitment to create meaningful impacts on the wider community, not only females. Our goal is to take that mission and our passion for STEM and share it with as many people as possible.

One way we are doing this is our BuzzBand project, which was created as part of the 2021 FIRST Innovation Challenge. The BuzzBand is a wearable fitness device designed to make exercise accessible for youth with autism. This year, we received one of the eight Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams grants for $10,000 to continue this project. With the help of this grant, the BuzzBand team is working to improve the design of the arm band device by creating and testing additional prototypes. More information is available on our website.

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