New school year means the LigerBots are back in action. The lion may sleep tonight, but the Ligers were not all asleep this summer. Check back to see what the LigerBots have been up to all summer!

The LigerBots will be hosting our annual FIRST LEGO League Information Night, this Wednesday, June 18th, 2025. It will be 7 – 8:30 PM at the Newton North Film Lecture Hall (just off the main atrium, near Tiger Drive). More information and a signup form can be found here.

On May 31, 2025, we competed at the inaugural Massachusetts State Championship at Merrimack College in North Andover. Although we were faced with some fierce competitors, we were ready for an epic day of matches!

This was not an official season competition, but rather one run by the FIRST NE district. The top 24 teams from Massachusetts gathered on top of the covered ice rink at Merrimack College and competed against each other for the title of Massachusetts State Champion.

During the qualification matches, we competed in 7 of the 28 total matches. It was quite stressful as this meant that we had many 3 match turnarounds, as opposed to our season events where we usually have at least 5 match turnarounds, if not even longer. We had to work harder and more efficiently. Even still, we were able to win 5 of our matches to end ranked in 5th place.

After the qualifying matches and lunch, we went into alliance selection. The 2nd ranked team, our good friends TJ2 (team 88) from Bridgewater, picked us as the 1st pick of their alliance. Together, we picked perSEVERE (team 5962) from Lowell to round out the alliance. Going into the playoffs, we had tough matches approaching us but we were determined to win.

Our alliance fought through the upper bracket, not losing a single match, even to alliance 1, which included the legendary Nutrons (team 125) and our Einstein partners Nashoba Robotics (team 1768)! In the finals, we were unsurprisingly up against alliance 1 again. We were confident we could win again- and we did- twice! This crowned our alliance as the first ever Massachusetts State Champions, earning ourselves our fourth blue banner from this season and a glass trophy!

We were so happy to compete and win this event! We look forward to future competitions in coming seasons and until then, an amazing summer!

Over the weekend of May 31st, the Ligerbots walked with the Carroll Center at the Walk for Independence. Stay tuned for the complete blogpost!

On Wednesday, May 21, 2025, the LigerBots planted American flags in memory of and in respect for deceased veterans as part of the flag planting ceremony for Memorial Day at the Newton Cemetery & Arboretum.

Flag planting is done to honor the service and sacrifice of deceased veterans by placing flags at their graves, a small yet powerful gesture of remembrance and respect.

Because Memorial Day was coming up, in honor of the veterans, we joined Mr. Mazzola, who is a veteran and the liaison to the Veterans Office. Alongside the other flag planting volunteers, we planted between 600 to 800 flags!

The annual flag planting at the Newton Cemetery for Memorial Day is a long tradition for LigerBots Coach Greer Swiston. This year marked her 22nd year of planting flags at the Newton Cemetery.

It was a good day for flag planting this year since there was little rain. We look forward to flag planting next year!