As was broadly reported in the news, Newton teachers went on strike on Friday, January 19, 2024. During the strike, all Newton public school activities were postponed so we could not meet in our workshop at Newton South. Thankfully, we had a strong partnership with WPS Institute, a local non-profit, and they generously offered us space for our student members to continue to gather at their facilities. We set up operations at WPS in a few different spaces, which allowed the many sub-groups, like electrical and engineering, to continue working. Our gatherings at WPS were informal meetings organized by our student leadership with the supervision of interested parents.

After seventeen days of meeting at WPS, the strike ended, allowing students to return to school—and LigerBots to our shop. On Monday, February 5, we packed up our things from WPS and transported them back to South.                          

Despite the setbacks, having a place to work at WPS enabled us to be remarkably productive during our busy build season! We would like to give a huge thank you to WPS for giving us a safe space to congregate and be productive during this period. We finished the robot’s chassis, brought the intake and shooter from prototypes to fully functional mechanisms, and finalized this year’s t-shirts, banners, and booklets.

On Saturday January 27, 2024, The LigerBots CTO Julia and Coach Greer visited the girl scouts at Norwood Church of God. The LigerBots members brought an unfinished outreach robot, so that they could teach the girl scouts the designing process on how to transform a piece of metal into a finished robot, which they explained with a presentation. For the rest of the day, Coach Greer and Julia would help the girl scouts finish their project of building a vibrated robot. LigerBots member Julia quotted, “I think it went really well. The people were very appreciative of what we did. Yeah. The girls were really cute, hopefully I inspired them to be robotic nerds”.

Last Saturday, January 6, at the WPS Institute, The LigerBots kicked off its 2024 FIRST Robotics Season for this year’s FRC game, Crescendo! This will be The LigerBots’ 16th season participating in FRC. 

That Saturday, the team launched its annual three day design process. This activity brings every team member and mentor, no matter what their specialty on the team, into the engineering process, and leaves us all with an improved ability to brainstorm, negotiate, organize, and present our ideas.

On day one, our team split up into seven cohorts discussing and developing robot game strategy, crunching numbers of cycles times and point-values. Across the different spaces in the WPS building, fervent discussions were heard and whiteboards were filled with ideas. 

After six hard working hours, each group presented their strategy proposals in front of the whole team. All the ideas were taken into consideration and pros and cons were discussed by everyone on the team. 

Sunday, on the first snowy day of the year, groups met online to brainstorm and draft mechanisms to achieve the goals discussed on Saturday. Even snow cannot stop the LigerBots passion for robotics! 

Monday was a continuation of Sunday’s design process, finalizing ideas within groups in preparation for the mechanism presentation which were presented to the team the next day. 

Tuesday was when we did mechanism presentations of our prototype designs and did full team discussions.

On December 16th, The LigerBots hosted the FIRST Lego League (FLL) Eastern Massachusetts State Championships, a competition using Lego robots built by students from grade 4-8 passionate about robotics, at Newton North High School. Alongside the championship, the LigerBots also hosted a public STEAM Expo that brought together 48 teams and around 1000 people attended, the event also included the STEAM Expo where many STEAM activities were conducted to educate and immerse children in STEAM.

The FLL Championship was a competition as well as a public event, inviting politicians such as Congressman Jake Auchincloss. Many children along with their parents as well as the FLL teams were able to enjoy both the FLL competition and STEAM Expo.

“The kids loved the expo, especially the slime.” said Timothy, student manager of the STEAM Expo.

Many first years on the team experienced teaching younger kids in the form of running STEAM activities all throughout the event.

“It was really exciting to see the look on the children’s faces when they begin to see the correlation between the activity and STEAM.” said Andrew, first year member on LigerBots.

In the competition gym, there was an exciting atmosphere as the teams focused on their matches. There was a lot of gracious professionalism and coordination shown.

“While I was MCing I was noticing how coordinated all the teams were and the gracious professionalism and communication the kids had with each other. I believe all awards given were definitely deserved.” said Davis, former CMO of LigerBots.

We congratulate the Goofy Gyros especially as they move on to the World FLL Championships after they won both the FLL qualifier and championship we hosted.

LigerBots congratulates all the teams who made it to nationals and a big thank you to all the teams who attended!

The LigerBots will host a STEAM activity expo for children and robot zoo on Dec. 16 from 10-3 at Newton North High School, accompanying the Massachusetts East FIRST LEGO League Championship, which runs from 9-4. The entire event is free and open to the public.