Last weekend the LigerBots competed in the 19th annual BattleCry@WPI off-season competition, where we made it to the playoffs and finished in eighteenth place. We also planted over 600 flags for Memorial Day on the graves of veterans in the Newton Cemetery.

In the three weeks between the FIRST World Championship and BattleCry, we experimented with new code and built robot ramps to lift alliance partners off the ground for extra points during the end game. Some of these ideas didn’t end up working out, but building them was still a great opportunity for the team to try out new designs in a lower-stakes competition.

BattleCry never follows the official FIRST rules exactly. They add twists to the game to encourage teams to try new ways to play, and to just make things more fun. Teams often replace their driver and human players with junior members to train them for the next year. They even add their own awards, like the eponymous “BattleCry” award, given to the team with the loudest, most attention-grabbing cheers. All in all, the entire competition is one big experiment. In our matches, the LigerBots subbed in new human players and drive coaches, so that our newer team members could get experience in a lower-pressure, lower-octane environment.

FIRST is all about preparing students for college, whether they are planning to be engineers or business majors or anything else. Our entire season is full of experiences and lessons that will prepare us for communication, organization, and leadership. But, BattleCry also prepares us for spending the night in a college dorm. Twenty-three of us stayed in the WPI dormitories! Sharing a room with other people and still being able to function the next day is a very important skill in life. We were a little sleepy during our final two qualification matches on Sunday, but we still got picked by the eighth alliance captain, team 4909. After lunch, we participated in another tradition: the human player game. Everyone sent out team members instead of robots onto the field, where they raced to stack power cubes for a trophy.

We are looking forward to our next offseason competition, Beantown Blitz, next October.

This week, a group of LigerBots went to the Newton Cemetery to plant over 600 flags on the graves of veterans. On Sunday we will  march with our 2016 and 2018 robots in the Newton Memorial Day parade. We are grateful to have these two opportunities to remember our fellow citizens who served our country in the armed forces.