Blast off! The robot build season has begun! On January fifth, twenty-seven LigerBots students and ten mentors made our annual pilgrimage to Manchester, NH, the home of FIRST founder Dean Kamen, to attend the FIRST Robotics 2019 Destination: Deep Space robot game challenge reveal and kickoff. We had so many LigerBots that we occupied eight cars and nearly a quarter of the bleachers at the Southern New Hampshire University.

In addition to watching the outer-spaced themed game reveal video, we listened to speeches by Dean Kamen, Woodie Flowers, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, and got access to the encrypted game manual so that we could learn all of the rules. Our students were so eager to know the details that many of them read and discussed the entire, 125-page manual in their carpools on the way back to Newton. Everyone wanted to be ready for intense discussions in their three-day design groups the next day.

The LigerBots three-day design process is our way of including every team member, no matter what their usual area of concentration on the team, in the design of our robot. By spreading our rookies and veterans out among the groups we give our newer and quieter members an opportunity to demonstrate, lead, and speak. All team members, including those who usually work on non-technical tasks, meet for two days in groups of nine or ten team members and a mentor, to brainstorm game strategy and general mechanical approaches to accomplishing tasks in the robot game. On the third day a panel of representatives from each group presents the groups’ recommendations for game strategy and robot mechanisms.

Because our team is so big this year we had nine groups, all meeting at different locations during the two days after the game kickoff. Some groups sketched strategy decisions and preliminary designs on a whiteboard, some used a mockup of the playing field to push around game elements. But, every approach led to lively tactical debates about how to score the most points and about the best way to maneuver this year’s game pieces: a playground ball that represents spaceship cargo, and a flat disk that represents a rocket ship hatch panel.

The leaders of our various build groups (who specialize in various mechanical, electrical and programming features of the robot) met on the fourth day to discuss the groups’ proposals and come up with a robot design that would accomplish the consensus game strategy. Our initial ambitions are to place the “cargo” and “hatch panel” into both the low and high goals on the “rocket” field element, and to climb onto the second level of the “habitat” home-base platform. We may add more skills to our robot if we find we have time to do so during our six-week build season.

Our students are now creating our mechanisms with computer aided design (CAD), building field elements to allow us to test our mechanisms, and are experimenting with the game pieces on various surfaces to see how they can best be manipulated. We have begun tracking our processes using the Trello and flame chart project management tools we introduced last season.

Our weekly team dinners have begun, and we are happy to have those brief moments on Friday to eat, relax, and talk about everything we are accomplishing.

The marketing side of our team has also gone into high gear now that we know the robot game. The awards submission group has started writing our Chairman’s Award essay and is devising questionnaires about LigerBots activities to send out to our team members. The awards group has to finish their submission in early February, even before our robot is finished.

Team members are using the elevator pitch skills they learned earlier this fall to pursue the corporate sponsorships and individual donations that allow the team to fund our robot build and outreach activities.

The graphics group has turned from their fall training in designing outreach STEM activity flyers to work on our robot repair-pit banners that show off the game theme and our team sponsors. Work has also begun on the booklet we produce annually that describes and illustrates everything we do at the LigerBots.

We are all so glad to have had the fall to learn new skills. All of them are getting put to good use now that we are in the most exciting and demanding part of our year.

Many team members are headed to Manchester, NH to participate live in the game kickoff. You can watch the show and see the videos from anywhere. The TwitchTV Broadcast begins at 10:30 am ET (preshow at 10:00 am) and can be found here. (Usually it is posted to watch later also). This page on the FIRST website has other links to get the season started. Once the game has been “revealed,” short videos about the game and different components should be available (often findable on YouTube) and the game manual will be “unlocked.” In addition, you can begin to access interpretations of the game as FIRST answers questions and groups like “Robot in 3 Days” try their hand at the rules. Many discussions on Chief Delphi will begin. The LigerBots kick off the season – after the game reveal – with our 3 Day Design Group process.

The LigerBots spent the last meetings before our holiday break swabbing the decks and battening down the hatches for the impending build season. Some of our recent team alumni who recently arrived home for their college winter breaks dropped by our meetings last week to help out.

After unpacking our supplies from the FIRST LEGO League Eastern MA Championship last week we cleaned out our storage spaces at Newton South High School. We filed several thousand dollars worth of raw metal and plastic materials we have recently ordered for building our 2019 robots.

Team members programmed our “road kill” practice robot with new code and libraries from FIRST and learned how to cut precise and repeatable holes with a new cutting tool on our mill. New LigerBots received a tutorial on reading FIRST game manuals so that they can quickly decipher the rules for the new game at kickoff on January 5, and a CAD tutorial that will help them quickly draft parts for our 2019 robot.

Our graphics group reviewed the series design they created for our STEM outreach activity flyers so that they can quickly create more flyers. After kickoff the group will launch right into the 2019 seasonal graphics such as our competition pit banners, robot flyers and team information booklet.

Broad Institute computational biologist Noam Shoresh came for a second visit to mentor the strategy council on their data analysis project. Students gathered data from every team we have played with or against during 2017 and 2018. We intend to use Python software to rank all of the teams by common characteristics such as offensive power rating, which is a measure of how many points on average a team contributes to the matches they play in. This will help us improve our strategy during matches and inform our picks for alliance partners during playoffs.

A large group of LigerBots is expected to make the trip to Bedford, NH on January 5 for the 2019 Destination: Deep Space FIRST Robotics game kickoff, and after that we will have six weeks in which to build and program our robot.

On Saturday, Dec. 15 the LigerBots hosted the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Eastern Massachusetts Championship.  In addition to competing in LEGO robot matches, 48 FLL teams from eastern Massachusetts presented their projects on this year’s outer-space theme,“Into Orbit.” The event also featured 10 FLL Jr. teams who presented their projects on this year’s FLL Jr. outer-space based theme, “Mission Moon.” More than 1100 people attended, including teams and members of the public.

Accompanying the tournament was a maker fair featuring hands on activities from the Brandeis Maker Lab, Code Ninjas,  Newton Free Library, Einstein’s Workshop, Empow Studios, Gamewright, Hatch Makerspace, Johnson String Instrument, Kevin Osborn, Maker, Massachusetts National Guard and Students for a Greener World. People dressed in Star Wars storm trooper costumes circulated and posed for photographs.

The maker fair was attended by 70 Newton Girl Scouts and served as their 2018 STEAM Workshop. The scouts earned their STEAM patch by participating in Ligerbots-sponsored activities, as well as those of other makers.

LigerBots offered many of our own hands-on STEAM activities, including conductive doughs, 3D printing, button making, paper airplanes, origami, brush bots, PB&J Robot, and binary beads. Our newly introduced slime activity proved to be extremely popular with our young visitors. 

Two FIRST Robotics teams, 1058 PVC Pirates and 4048 Redshift, joined the LigerBots in a robot “zoo” that encouraged young visitors to touch and drive the robots. The LigerBots set up our 2018 competition pit to display our outreach materials and our team sponsors.

In addition to running our own STEAM activity tables at the maker fair, LigerBots filled many roles at the event, as they did at the FLL Newton Qualifier in November. Our team members, alumni  and mentors helped organize the event, did setup and breakdown, acted as referees, competition field resetters, DJs, announcers, AV specialists, food concessionaires, guides, and photographers. 

We were grateful to have staffing help from the Newton South High School Science Team and the Newton North High School Computer Programming Club, as well as from Amit, team captain of Israeli FRC team 6740 Glue Gun and Glitter, who has been a visitor to LigerBots activities throughout most of the month of December. 

After we returned Newton North High School to its original, spotless condition after the championship, LigerBots gathered at the home of our COO, Jordan, to have a game and movie night. 

Every year our FLL events get bigger and better. We can’t wait to do it again next fall! To see more photos from this year’s FLL championship, please visit our Flickr album devoted to the event.

The LigerBots sell lots of donuts made by team sponsor Dunkin’ at our FIRST LEGO League competitions. This tasty snack seems to hit the spot with our FLL teams, their families, and our maker fair visitors during the long and exciting day at Newton North High School. But we often run out of certain kinds of donuts, and end the day with other kinds left unsold.  Before this year’s FLL Newton Qualifier on November 17 team COO Jordan Y., who usually helps staff the concession stand, became curious about which donut types sell the fastest and which the slowest, and at what times of day. He figured that analyzing this information could help the team make good decisions at our future FLL tournaments about which kinds of donuts to buy for resale.

During the Newton Qualifier Jordan took data. The LigerBots at the concession stand had a lively discussion, trying to predict when the most donuts would be sold. Although many team members believed that more donuts would be sold in the morning than in the late afternoon, it turned out that they sold at a fairly consistent pace throughout the day. Jordan found that although the donuts that sold out first were Oreo and Boston cream pie, the donut that sold at the fastest rate was plain glazed!

While the results were incredibly interesting, Jordan plans to improve his data sampling at the FLL E. MA State Championship on Dec. 15 because of some flaws in gathering data at the Qualifier. There was a false fire alarm that caused everyone to have to exit the building for thirty minutes of our donut-selling time. Also, the number of donuts sold during certain time spans was approximated because of the rushed atmosphere at the concession stand, when selling food was prioritized over taking data.