Despite the pandemic, the LigerBots have been picking up steam!
The team has grown with many new rookies joining in the past two months. Several team members went to virtual club day events at Newton North and South High Schools to talk to potential rookies about our work.
Coach Golando talks to club day visitees about the LigerBots.
We have also started our pre-season training, teaching rookies computer aided design and the principles of robot building. Once the school allows us to use the engineering room, we will begin modifying our robot with the concepts and improvements we have designed in quarantine.
The electrical team works on the board for our robot.
The non-technical sides of the team have completed several grants for sponsors and are in the process of getting yard signs for our team to promote ourselves during the pandemic.
Our Awesome Mentorship Project (AMP), created in the spring to help students during quarantine, is well into its fall session, with 20 buddy pairs at recent count. We recently submitted a white paper about our work on AMP and its expansion into a summer camp (cAMP) to the FIRST community(link here). Parents and students all around gave enthusiastic feedback to us, and we were even featured in the Boston Globe! Thank you all for supporting us during these trying times.
We continue to be excited about the upcoming year. Stay tuned for more!
LigerBots’ Whitepaper on Distance Education
October 25, 2020
In the spring, the LigerBots created the Awesome Mentor Project (AMP), a free, virtual program where high school students could mentor elementary school students during quarantine. The program grew rapidly, and by the end of the spring session in June, we had 80 mentor-mentee pairs.
The success of AMP allowed us to expand the program into a free, Zoom-based summer program for elementary school students called Camp AMP. With 80 high school students volunteering to teach classes for 150 campers, it proved a major accomplishment for the team.
We learned many things about distance education throughout the course of both programs. In fact, the Boston Globe said that we“cracked the code for making virtual learning fun.” We detailed our findings in awhite paper which we would like to share with everyone.
The key points detailed in the white paper are:
Adapting to a virtual learning environment
Providing education and entertainment for students
Building an engaged online community
To view the white paper, see the attached file, or use this link:
If you are interested in joining the LigerBots, please fill out the form at ligerbots.org/join. We will send you the information to attend our semi-weekly meetings on Zoom. The LigerBots has opportunities for Newton high school students with all interests, including business, marketing, engineering and programming. We are “more than robots”.
Sign up for AMP Fall today!
September 19, 2020
Our Awesome Mentorship Project, conceived as a program to have high schoolers do fun activities with or tutor elementary school students via the Internet during quarantine, has grown into a program beyond even our grandest hopes!. We had a successful 82 mentor pairs by our spring session’s end, and soon expanded it into a full-fledged virtual summer camp with 150 students and 80 teachers, that we ran along with a summer session of AMP. We could not have done this without the gracious support of the parents, the enthusiastic kids, and the devoted teachers and mentors, so thank you all!
But, we’re not done–we are offering a fall session of AMP! We anticipate that like the spring, many will be staying at home more, especially as the winter months settle in, so this program is a great way for mentor and mentee alike to bond and spend time together!
Stay safe everyone and we hope to see you all in person really soon!
Missed our first FLL Info Night? Come to our second one!
September 14, 2020
For those who missed our first FLL Info night, we’ll be hosting a second virtual info night on Wednesday, September 23th at 7 pm to introduce parents to FIRST LEGO League (FLL) and how to get involved. to learn how to build and program a LEGO robot to solve specific problems. The goal is to create a fun and friendly atmosphere for learning.
If parents can’t make the info night or need more information, there is additional information included at the bottom. Parents are encouraged to talk to their children to see if they’re interested. We can’t wait to see you all there!
