On February 26, T-Shirts for The LigerBots finally arrived!

The theme for our new design this year is music! The design shows our mascot, Thaddeus with a microphone in hand, during his crescendo world tour. All the designs were designed by our students on the graphics team.

As shown on previous year’s t-shirts, we include the names of all our sponsors on the back.

“Despite the strike, we were able to effectively document and order T-shirts, and we are excited to finally distribute them!” said team member Timothy.

After the long process of organizing everyone’s t-shirts, our team is overjoyed to be able to wear our brand new t-shirts for upcoming competitions and events!

Every Friday during build season, parent volunteers bring dinner for our hungry team members. The team is grateful for the parents’  hard work and dedication put into our team dinners.

Our team went to 8th grade night at Newton North on leap day February 29. During this event, we actively tried  to recruit the younger generation to join The LigerBots!

We set up a table with information about the team, and drove around our past year’s robot, to attract the eye of interested 8th graders.  We also had some great conversations with 8th graders and their parents.

“We had lots of fun showcasing our robot to excited kids who were interested in joining The LigerBots next year!” said team member Andrew.

We hope we get many kids interested in joining LigerBots next year!

On February 22, we are two weeks away from our first FIRST Robotics Competition at Bridgewater state.

The robot is going through the final process, before being sent out for practices at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) this Saturday, March 2.

“We made solid progress this week, but we still have much more to do,” said build lead, Liam. 

We attached our shooter mechanism onto our robot. Build team is now focused on the robot’s elevator mechanism.

Team members gather at the end of the meeting to discuss end of build season tasks that need to be done before competition, led by student COO, Charlotte.

“We’re in the final stretch of build season and even though there’s undoubtedly a lot more to do, it’s incredible to see how much progress we’ve made over the past six weeks,” said Charlotte.

We are excited to get our robot in action for our first FIRST robotics competition of the year: the New England District Bridgewater State University Event on March 8 through March 10.

As was broadly reported in the news, Newton teachers went on strike on Friday, January 19, 2024. During the strike, all Newton public school activities were postponed so we could not meet in our workshop at Newton South. Thankfully, we had a strong partnership with WPS Institute, a local non-profit, and they generously offered us space for our student members to continue to gather at their facilities. We set up operations at WPS in a few different spaces, which allowed the many sub-groups, like electrical and engineering, to continue working. Our gatherings at WPS were informal meetings organized by our student leadership with the supervision of interested parents.

After seventeen days of meeting at WPS, the strike ended, allowing students to return to school—and LigerBots to our shop. On Monday, February 5, we packed up our things from WPS and transported them back to South.                          

Despite the setbacks, having a place to work at WPS enabled us to be remarkably productive during our busy build season! We would like to give a huge thank you to WPS for giving us a safe space to congregate and be productive during this period. We finished the robot’s chassis, brought the intake and shooter from prototypes to fully functional mechanisms, and finalized this year’s t-shirts, banners, and booklets.

On Saturday January 27, 2024, The LigerBots CTO Julia and Coach Greer visited the girl scouts at Norwood Church of God. The LigerBots members brought an unfinished outreach robot, so that they could teach the girl scouts the designing process on how to transform a piece of metal into a finished robot, which they explained with a presentation. For the rest of the day, Coach Greer and Julia would help the girl scouts finish their project of building a vibrated robot. LigerBots member Julia quotted, “I think it went really well. The people were very appreciative of what we did. Yeah. The girls were really cute, hopefully I inspired them to be robotic nerds”.

Last Saturday, January 6, at the WPS Institute, The LigerBots kicked off its 2024 FIRST Robotics Season for this year’s FRC game, Crescendo! This will be The LigerBots’ 16th season participating in FRC. 

That Saturday, the team launched its annual three day design process. This activity brings every team member and mentor, no matter what their specialty on the team, into the engineering process, and leaves us all with an improved ability to brainstorm, negotiate, organize, and present our ideas.

On day one, our team split up into seven cohorts discussing and developing robot game strategy, crunching numbers of cycles times and point-values. Across the different spaces in the WPS building, fervent discussions were heard and whiteboards were filled with ideas. 

After six hard working hours, each group presented their strategy proposals in front of the whole team. All the ideas were taken into consideration and pros and cons were discussed by everyone on the team. 

Sunday, on the first snowy day of the year, groups met online to brainstorm and draft mechanisms to achieve the goals discussed on Saturday. Even snow cannot stop the LigerBots passion for robotics! 

Monday was a continuation of Sunday’s design process, finalizing ideas within groups in preparation for the mechanism presentation which were presented to the team the next day. 

Tuesday was when we did mechanism presentations of our prototype designs and did full team discussions.