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.