The LigerBots will be hosting its annual FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) information night on June 22, 2022, from 7:00-8:30, at Newton South High School. You can register and find more information at ligerbots.org/fll.
The LigerBots will be having their first meeting on Monday, September thirteenth at 6:30pm!!

Are you a Newton public high school student who is interested in entrepreneurship, leadership, or robotics? The LigerBots are a joint Newton North/Newton South FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team. The team offers training and hands-on experience in a wide variety of technical, business, and other fields including manufacturing, electrical engineering, programming, marketing, graphics, and more! If you’re interested, find them at Newton North’s Film Lecture Hall on Monday the 13th at 6:30 pm to learn about the team and talk to its members. Visit their join page (https://ligerbots.org/join) to register! Students must attend Newton North or Newton South to join the team.

The LigerBots have been keeping busy during the 2021 off-season! The team is working on a number of projects, and we have participated in multiple events in the past few weeks.

On July 27th, two LigerBots representatives toured the facilities of a local robotics company called Barrett Technology with their CEO, Bill Townsend. The company creates advanced robotic instruments like BURT, a machine which aids patients who are recovering from brain damage.

On August 1st, the LigerBots participated in an off-season competition called BattleCry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The team worked really hard to get our robot competition ready, and we were extremely happy with how it performed. Our alliance placed third out of six alliances, while our team placed eighth out of twenty-four individual teams.

During the summer, the LigerBots have been assembling and beta testing a differential swerve drive—a new type of drivetrain that can strafe left and right and move forward extremely quickly. It combines the maneuverability of a normal swerve drive with enhanced acceleration and increased torque.

Another project the team has been working on is redesigning our website. The graphics group has been hard at work reorganizing the website’s many pages, along with creating new pages and designs. The team can’t wait to see how the new website will look.
We’re all looking forward to the beginning of the preseason in September, and we can’t wait to see what the year will bring!
As we leap into the new season, we’ve been busy as ever. With submissions already passed in, project groups have started their interviews and we’ve got exciting new events coming up!
The team working on Infinite Challenge at Home are preparing hard for their interview. As usual, they have had regular in-person meetings in the school to modify the robot and take videos of their submissions. With the slideshow and speech made, they are now working on putting on the finishing touches.
The Game Design Challenge Team have devised a train-based game, called Locomotive Linkage and complete with manual and field elements, for submission. The graphics team aided in the creation of visuals for field elements and the logo. Their interview will happen today–good luck to them!
Over at the Innovation Challenge, the team has decided to build a watch to facilitate better communication between deaf players and referees. While continuing to develop two versions of the hardware, they completed their initial interview on March 27 and are now getting a head start on semi-final work, due April 21st.
The Chairman’s team successfully completed their interview as well, talking about our outreach work during the pandemic. We are eagerly anticipating the results.
Meanwhile, our spring session of the Awesome Mentorship Program (AMP) is in full swing, and we hope to keep this program flourishing. The marketing team also has an exciting event that is ready to get in motion: a Scratch hackathon (a coding competition to code the best project in a day) for children grade 4-8 on April 3rd from 1-5 pm. It’s looking to be a fun time for everyone involved!
A new season brings with it a fresh new wave of energy and optimism, and we hope to continue carrying this wave with us as we work to complete all our projects. We’re looking forward to what comes next!