School has begun, and the LigerBots have dived right into STEM outreach, member recruitment and preseason training. Ramping up our task planning during the summer months has given us a big head start on our fall.

During the first two weeks of the preseason returning LigerBots have shown our many new new recruits around the Newton South workshop and have helped them take apart the 2014 robot to teach them the basics of assembly and disassembly. We also start every year with a seminar on shop safety and use of our power tools.

We have a new game strategy council which has begun discussing which FIRST competitions to enter in the spring, how to incorporate game strategy earlier and more thoroughly into our robot design, and how to improve our system of collecting performance data on other teams.

Our team STEM outreach is already underway.  We will be at the Newton Free Library’s STEAM Expo on Saturday, Sept. 15, at RoboExpo in Nashua NH on Sept. 22, and at Newtonville Village Day on the afternoon of Sept. 23. Our team members have already put in lots of time to get ready for these events. And, all hands will be on deck on Monday, Sept. 17, when we will have an exciting open house with many activities for prospective team members. Please join us at these events!

The LigerBots will host an open house for prospective team members on Monday, September 17, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Newton South wood shop, room 9170.

The LigerBots is more than just robots! In addition to building and programming a new competitive robot every year, we run our team as a small business, do STEM outreach throughout our community, and support our team’s activities through marketing, social media, and journalism. We need new team members with many different interests and skill sets. Come to our open house and find your niche on our top robotics team! This will be a hands-on evening, with a basic introduction to the team, opportunities to drive a robot, use power tools, do engineering challenge games, create marketing materials, meet current team members and mentors, and eat dessert! For more information, email [email protected].

The LigerBots have continued to be active in our outreach and our technical training over the summer. Team members have been enthusiastically mentoring one of three new FLL teams that resulted from the FLL info night the LigerBots ran in June. We also have hosted a series of CAD training sessions for our veteran LigerBots, and have met as a team to plan our fall.

Several LigerBots have given mentorship and support to the SuperNovas, a new Waban FLL team. The LigerBots are helping the Supernovas to write sponsor requests, navigate FIRST logistics, learn public speaking, develop teamwork, and learn other useful skills important both for FLL competition and for the FLL students’ personal development. With the FLL season starting, the SuperNovas are eager to learn and work hard for their first competition!

To improve our team’s own technical prowess over the summer we ran a series of CAD training projects. Each week over the course of a month students completed a CAD exercise and then met to discuss their solutions to the weekly CAD challenge with mentors and other students. The exercises included modeling a joint between two pieces of metal box tubing, a bicycle sprocket, and a multi-stage gear box. Having a larger and more experienced group of CAD designers and drafters will enable us to design our 2019 robot more efficiently during build season.

We are about to start our new school year and already have had several team meetings to organize our fall. We are excited to be offering a large variety of technical and marketing training sessions during our preseason, and will be doing a lot of community outreach as soon as our official meetings start, after Labor Day. Please look for us at the Newton Free Library STEAM Expo from 12-3 on September 15 and at Newtonville Village Day from 12-5 on September 23. And, all Newton public high school students are invited to come learn about the team at our open house in the wood shop at Newton South on Sept. 17 from 6:30-8:30 p.m..

The LigerBots have just announced awards for our third annual 3D printing contest. Our first place trophy was awarded to Boston-based FRC team 125, the Nutrons, for two complex pieces of their Power Cube elevator mechanism. Our finalist trophy was awarded to a New York-based FRC Team 3624, the ThunderColts, for their creative use of 3D printed chains to substitute for more expensive metal links.

This competition was open to anyone using 3D-printed parts for a robotics project but was aimed primarily at FRC teams that used 3D printing in building their robots for the 2018 FRC season. We have seen some amazing uses of 3D printed parts, including teams that printed virtually all of their parts because they had no access to metal shops or other types of equipment, or because they wanted to save time, money, or couldn’t get what they wanted off-the-shelf.

We promoted this year’s competition extensively through social media and by handing out flyers at the pits at competitions we attended. This year we also enlisted the help of teams all over the world to share information about the competition during their regional events. These marketing partners included FRC teams 1058, PVC Pirates (NH); 1991, Dragons (CT); 2702, Rebels (Ontario); 3132, Thunder Down Under (Austrialia); 3146, Granby Grunts (CT); 4416, Skynet (Israel); 4571, Rambots (NY); and 5940, B.R.E.A.D. (CA).

Last weekend six LigerBots traveled to South Portland, Maine to compete (and win!) with our 2018 robot in a one day Power Up event, Summer Heat, hosted by FRC team 58, Riot Crew. This offseason competition highlights building relationships and having fun in a low stress environment. Organizers of offseason events often make the gameplay unique by adding minor, quirky elements to the rules. At this year’s Summer Heat, eight blow-up beach balls could be thrown onto the field during the last 30 seconds of each match. Robots could then put these balls through the Exchange, a slot originally intended for “Power Cube” game pieces, for a large number of additional points.

Our robot performed well even after a full season of play, breakage and repairs. Even when Chronos’ Power Cube intake nearly broke off during a game, we were able to quickly and efficiently perform a repair during the tight turnaround before the next match. This was also an opportunity for our postseason drive team to get some more game experience, and they did great. We lost only one match during the entire competition.

After placing sixth after qualifications matches, we were selected, along with FRC team 885, Robovines, by the first alliance captain, FRC team 4564, Orange Chaos, and we won the entire event!

LigerBots FIRST mentorship and outreach continue into the summer. Several LigerBots are currently helping to run a new FLL team based in Waban. The team sprang from interest created among local families by our highly successful FLL Info Night back in June. The group of five Newton elementary and middle school school students has recently met at the house of our new CMO, Meredith, to make plans for the future of the team. LigerBots will help the new FLL team make its own FLL practice table and assist the group into the fall as it prepares for the 2018 FLL game, “Into Orbit,” which has an outer-space theme.

This past week, the LigerBots represented Massachusetts along with the Green Reapers (FRC Team 1735, from Worcester) in Washington, D.C. to advocate with the rest of the 250 FIRST National Advocacy Conference attendees for the reauthorization of the Perkins Act of 2006 and for provision of the full budget allocated for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Funds from the Perkins Act provide grants for technical education and STEM opportunities in second careers to those who may otherwise not be able to afford it. ESSA includes a flexible block grant program under Title IV Part A, which can be used by school districts to provide and expand high-quality classroom-based and afterschool STEM programs. 

Our second goal was to grow connections with staffers and other FRC teams. We were given the opportunity to speak with Representative Kennedy III, as well as staffers from the offices of Senators Warren and Markey, and Representative Capuano.  

Before the conference began we went to the American Museum of Natural History.

On the first day of advocacy training, Steve Hyer (conference organizer and former mentor of FRC team 27, RUSH), Don Bossi (president of FIRST), and Dr. Jeff Weld (from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) spoke about the importance of STEM advocacy and gave a brief civics 101 lesson about how a bill gets passed. When the day was over, the LigerBots went back to the hotel to to work on preliminary drafts of our pitch to our representatives.

On the second day we attended presentations given by representatives from a number of educational organizations from across the U.S. about ESSA, Perkins, and how to advocate for a bill. We also listened to presentations by other FIRST teams about state-level advocacy efforts. We met with the Green Reapers to discuss and prepare our Senate pitch, and went out for a team-bonding dinner to get to know more about their team.

On the last day, fueled by a breakfast of pancakes, we entered the congressional offices, confident and ready to convince our representatives that this funding needs to happen. We talked a bit about FIRST and how the STEM community represents our future generation of engineers. We described how we want to grow FIRST and STEM by reauthorizing the Perkins Act and fully funding ESSA.

After a successful wrap-up of our presentations, we attended a reception, representing Massachusetts along with the Green Reapers. We met Fatima Terry from the Department of Defense (DoD), who said she’d like to have further exchanges between the LigerBots and the DoD about how to help students find their passions and pursue them more deeply before college. Each of us has come back to Newton inspired to promote the mission of supporting the funding of well-rounded STEM programs, and we look forward to attending next year’s conference; hopefully with an even greater number of team members.