The LigerBots spent the last meetings before our holiday break swabbing the decks and battening down the hatches for the impending build season. Some of our recent team alumni who recently arrived home for their college winter breaks dropped by our meetings last week to help out.

After unpacking our supplies from the FIRST LEGO League Eastern MA Championship last week we cleaned out our storage spaces at Newton South High School. We filed several thousand dollars worth of raw metal and plastic materials we have recently ordered for building our 2019 robots.

Team members programmed our “road kill” practice robot with new code and libraries from FIRST and learned how to cut precise and repeatable holes with a new cutting tool on our mill. New LigerBots received a tutorial on reading FIRST game manuals so that they can quickly decipher the rules for the new game at kickoff on January 5, and a CAD tutorial that will help them quickly draft parts for our 2019 robot.

Our graphics group reviewed the series design they created for our STEM outreach activity flyers so that they can quickly create more flyers. After kickoff the group will launch right into the 2019 seasonal graphics such as our competition pit banners, robot flyers and team information booklet.

Broad Institute computational biologist Noam Shoresh came for a second visit to mentor the strategy council on their data analysis project. Students gathered data from every team we have played with or against during 2017 and 2018. We intend to use Python software to rank all of the teams by common characteristics such as offensive power rating, which is a measure of how many points on average a team contributes to the matches they play in. This will help us improve our strategy during matches and inform our picks for alliance partners during playoffs.

A large group of LigerBots is expected to make the trip to Bedford, NH on January 5 for the 2019 Destination: Deep Space FIRST Robotics game kickoff, and after that we will have six weeks in which to build and program our robot.