On Saturday, September 21, the LigerBots hosted the first ever FRC RoboCon NE at WPS.  With many amazing speakers presenting, the event was a smashing success!

Many students and mentors volunteered to assist during the event and in the days leading up to it.  RoboCon would not have been possible without their help.

During one of the morning presentations, three members of the Gongoliers (FRC 5112) talked about their team’s organizational structure. Attendees learned about their skill badge system, where team members are awarded badges for doing things on the team and their department system where certain branches of the team fall into categories.

Keynote speaker, Robin Saitz, the former Chief Marketing Officer at Rockwell Automation, and a longtime sponsor of the LigerBots, talked about her experience working at a variety of companies such as Raytheon, GTE, PTC, Brainshark, Avecto, Plex, and Rockwell. She is also a founding mentor of our team.

Adrienne Clark, our second keynote speaker, is the Director of Engineering Operations at Re:Build Fikst.  Adrienne talked about learning from failure, in which she gave a presentation about famous failures in the past and what went wrong.  She also suggested ways to improve in the workspace to prevent failure and be successful.

Other presentations included an alumni panel about how FIRST influences lives and careers, a race car building workshop by ALARM Robotics (FRC 2079), a presentation by Carly Buchanan and Dan Lavoie about mechanism design, a speech by Tufts student Hang Yu about learning, and a speech about efficiency by Blake Bourque.  The presentations were all very deep and fascinating with many thoughtful questions asked by attendees.  

We hope to host this event again next year and for many more years to come!