Meet FRC Team #9008 - G-Force Robotics, a second-year team from North Carolina!

Tell us a little bit about your team’s background.

We are an all-girl FRC team going into our 2nd year of competition. The 12 young women that make up our team are Allie, Claire, Payton, Shelby, Sloan, Kaitlyn, Sydney, Angelina, Elle, Allison, Madeline and Carolyn. G-Force Robotics is a community team and the members come from 10 different schools representing the public, early college, charter, and homeschool communities. The entire team is either returning from their championship-winning rookie season or has past FRC experience. The bulk of the team focuses on mechanical/electrical build with everyone helping in the marketing and outreach arena. The team believes in giving back to their community and inspiring young girls in STEM. Since the team formed in May 2022, they have given more than 2,500 volunteer hours to their community. The major initiative is G-Force Girls SOAR: Success through Outreach, Advocacy and Robotics. They were the FIRST Championship Rookie All Star awardees in the Milstein Division and look to continue that success into year two. As an aviation-themed team our mascot is Zoomie - a giant, white airplane with pink stripes (people rarely guess it's a plane, but look for Zoomie in a future video!). We have built three robots thus far: Electra, WASP, and Spitfire.

What goals are your team working towards this season?

• We have been invited to coordinate the Wings Over Wayne Air Show STEM Hangar again in 2025. We coordinated and executed the first Wings Over Wayne Air Show STEM Hangar in May 2023 for 62,000 attendees. 
• Build a competitive swerve robot and learn pneumatics to make our gameplay and robot more effective/efficient on the field, ranking in the top 10 of North Carolina teams.
• Advocacy - engaging more female legislators at all levels of government to promote STEM for underserved/underrepresented populations in their community. One of our team members is now an intern for SASA for 2023-2024.
• Growing our Be That Engineer Literacy Project to a global level. We are engaging more local schools, and have expanded to Michigan. We are talking to teams in Turkey and Libya, and are seeking books in Arabic that will support our initiative.
• Win the Engineering Inspiration Award at the district and state level.

What has your team been working on recently?

In October, we engaged 4,000 students at the Charlotte Motor Speedway STEAM Expo, 1,000 attendees at the Washington-Warren Air & Drone Show, and saw crowds near 30,000 at the Clayton Harvest Festival. We participated in SCRIW and learned even more about how our swerve drive functions.

November was incredibly busy! We presented for two days to 3,500 8th graders at JoCo Works. We joined FRC 3737 for the Wayne Co STEAM Festival for 1,000 attendees. Santa is working on his carbon footprint and has cut his budget a little this year. His elves could not travel from the North Pole to be part of the Clayton Tree Lighting event on Nov. 30, so Santa asked G-Force Robotics to fill in. We helped our town performing duties as Santa's elves for the annual tree lighting for thousands of residents. We started award preparation and worked on pneumatics on a new chassis robot. We presented books to 2 schools and connected with NC PBS Kids who will visit our build space soon.

We have been working hard to grow our "Be That Engineer" literacy project for elementary school students. We are excited that this program has spread to Michigan and Texas, and that we are engaging companies and organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Northrop Grumman, US Space Force, Grifols, OnLogic, SWE and many more to help us. This is a great program that unites FIRST with large corporations and our schools to spread the message of STEM! We would love to help more teams get started with this program.

What is your team enjoying within the #TeamREV Sponsorship Program?

We love the support we get from the REV staff and from other REV teams! Recently, we met a new #TeamREV team, FRC 3489: Category 5, at an off-season competition. We shared our excitement to both be part of the program. We are also excited to put our creative hats on for another season of Team REV videos! We've learned a lot during the off-season, and we are ready to turn up the fun this year.

We're excited to see your creativity shine as the season unfolds, G-Force Robotics! Find the team on these platforms:

• Website
• Facebook
• X (Twitter)
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn