FIRST ^® Robotics Competition team “Girls of Steel,” based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, is on a mission to empower everyone, especially women and girls, to believe they are capable of success in STEM.

With that mission, an inclusive team environment that encourages excitement for learning, and a shared passion for STEM, the team is committed to creating meaningful impact on the wider community – women and girls in STEM and beyond.

One way they do this is through their “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. Since the challenge, they received one of the eight 2021-2022 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams^® grants for $10,000 to continue this project. With the help of this grant, the BuzzBand team worked to improve the design of the patent pending arm band device by creating and testing additional prototypes.