Yes, there is. You can’t expect a seasoned veteran of LigerBots to go a whole summer without robotics, and neither did we. That’s why, for the fourth summer in a row, LigerBots has offered students the Adaptive Engineering summer internship that coaches Greer Swiston and John Sangiolo created to solve that exact issue: summer engineering. 

This year, four groups spent eight weeks designing custom products to improve their clients’ quality of life. One team partnered with the Carroll Center for the Blind to finish an upper-body obstacle navigation device, complete with a chest-mounted sensor and a haptic feedback watch, while another group built distance-detecting sensors for a visually impaired client’s wheelchair. Meanwhile, a group of Lazer Robotics members created a switch-activated wind-tunnel toy for residents at New England Pediatric Care. Finally, the fourth team worked with the Animal Rescue League of Boston to build an interactive puzzle feeder featuring a ramp, scratching posts, buttons, and a food dispenser for a potbelly pig named Gordy.

Beyond the physical builds, the summer provided the high schoolers with hands-on experience in real-world client collaboration, prototyping, and software engineering. That’s not to mention the invaluable project-managing and budgeting skills that they learned. Newton North junior Alyssa Yasuhara emphasized the importance of staying in “constant communication” with their client, noting that “every time we finish a prototype, we always like to go back to the Carroll Center to get the members’ feedback.” The experience ultimately helped her “develop my passion for engineering, specifically assistive technology,” and “opened my eyes to a possible future in medical technology development.”

Can they solve the puzzle?

Similarly, Newton South junior Eren Safar viewed the internship as “a great opportunity for me to not only improve my engineering skills and software skills, but also to put them to the test and see if I can actually build something that would not just be good on paper, but actually be good in real life.” For Jerry Gong, founder of Lazer Robotics, participating for a third year allowed his team to “learn a lot from our experiences in the prior year” while combining “the engineering we do on a robotics team with real life needs for clients in the real world.”

But if you thought that’s all the LigerBots had to offer in the summer, you’d be gravely mistaken. There’s the Ligerboxes STEAM camp, where team members teach a STEAM curriculum in a week-long camp for 3rd-5th graders with, well, Ligerboxes. There were Computer Aided Design (CAD) training meetings, where, in preparation for the build season, any team members wanting to join the CAD team could learn how to expertly navigate the software and design FRC-grade mechanisms.

And now that the summer’s over, we’re back in full swing, with the Mayhem in Merrimack competition coming up, in addition to all our scheduled outreach events, the Pumpkin smash on November 7th and the FLL qualifiers on November 21st to name a few of many coming up. 

Hope to see you there!