On Saturday, January 4th 2025, the LigerBots got together at WPS to kick off this year’s competition season as a team.

First, we watched a video livestream from FIRST presenting the game overview for this year’s game which is called Reefscape. In this game, Robots score pipes called coral on a metal bar structure known as a reef. At the same time, robots take playground balls called algae off and score them in a processor. Finally, robots climb on a metal cage to score the final points.

During the presentation, FIRST sent out the official game manual for Reefscape. After the presentation was over, we split into small groups for 3 Day Design, or 3DD for short and scoured the game manual to create a deeper understanding of the game.

After doing a quiz on the manual created by Coach Chris to help our members understand the game better, groups went into mechanism design for the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday. Each group came up with different parts of the robot such as mechanisms to pick up and score coral and algae as well as climb on the cage.

On Monday, the third day of 3DD, we started in our 3DD groups to finalize our ideas before each group got a turn to present their ideas to the whole team. After all groups had presented, we had an open discussion as a whole team to decide what mechanisms we would use.

This was such a successful design period! We are excited to build our new 2025 robot in the upcoming weeks, and we are even more excited to compete with it in a few months!