Even during our six week, robot-build season, the LigerBots do STEM outreach! This week we demonstrated our 2016 robot at the “Just Think: Teens Making Smart Choices” expo at Newton North High School, a gathering of many non-profit organizations that support teens and families in Newton and provide educational and prevention information and constructive activities. The Just Think attendees had fun driving our robot and catching the ball after it was launched. Newton mayor Ruthanne Fuller stopped by and took the robot for a spin, and a NewTV videographer filmed LigerBots team members talking about our robot and the expo.

After our intensive CADing session last weekend, the LigerBots were full of inspiration and excited to start building. Our team broke up into groups to work on basic elements of the robot and to continue the design process, as well as to write submissions to several FIRST awards, and plan future fundraising and STEM outreach efforts. Our new project planning system is keeping us super organized as we go.

We have decided to make a robot that will concentrate on placing milk-crate “cube” game pieces onto the “scale,” the tallest, see-saw-like goal in this year’s game. That means we need a way to pick up the cubes, lift them as high as eight feet, and release them onto one end of scale. We decided that the best way to accomplish this was to make a tall robot with an elevator system on metal rails.

Our students have created a mockup electrical control board, so we can start test driving our chassis even before we start adding the other mechanisms.

The programming group is writing a software framework to control all of the motors we will eventually build into the robot. We have cube intake and elevator prototypes and will be ready to finish building those mechanisms when parts arrive next week. We will get our parts very fast this year because many of our students have learned how to contribute to our formal purchasing system–just one of the many LigerBots skills we hope our team members will take with them to college and career.

We also improved our wood-working chops this year so that we could finish building playing field elements early in build season. We already have a replica of the scale and of the platform that will be used at the end of each robot game. Having our own field elements will allow us to practice the game right in the shop at Newton South High School once our robot is up and running.

We gathered during our six-hour Friday work session for our first team dinner of the season. We are grateful for the team parents who feed the LigerBots, get our students to our meetings and support all of the team’s projects.