The LigerBots will be bringing one – probably two – robots to march with our team during the Newton Memorial Day Parade tomorrow, Sunday May 27, 2018.   The parade starts at 3pm at Newton North High School – the team will be lining up on Elm St. at 2:30 pm – and ends at Colletti Park (at Bridge St. and Watertown St.) Here is the event poster  and similar information in the Newton Patch article.   There is NO parking on Elm St. or in the NNHS parking lot as these areas are needed to organize the parade participants.

Last weekend the LigerBots competed in the 19th annual BattleCry@WPI off-season competition, where we made it to the playoffs and finished in eighteenth place. We also planted over 600 flags for Memorial Day on the graves of veterans in the Newton Cemetery.

In the three weeks between the FIRST World Championship and BattleCry, we experimented with new code and built robot ramps to lift alliance partners off the ground for extra points during the end game. Some of these ideas didn’t end up working out, but building them was still a great opportunity for the team to try out new designs in a lower-stakes competition.

BattleCry never follows the official FIRST rules exactly. They add twists to the game to encourage teams to try new ways to play, and to just make things more fun. Teams often replace their driver and human players with junior members to train them for the next year. They even add their own awards, like the eponymous “BattleCry” award, given to the team with the loudest, most attention-grabbing cheers. All in all, the entire competition is one big experiment. In our matches, the LigerBots subbed in new human players and drive coaches, so that our newer team members could get experience in a lower-pressure, lower-octane environment.

FIRST is all about preparing students for college, whether they are planning to be engineers or business majors or anything else. Our entire season is full of experiences and lessons that will prepare us for communication, organization, and leadership. But, BattleCry also prepares us for spending the night in a college dorm. Twenty-three of us stayed in the WPI dormitories! Sharing a room with other people and still being able to function the next day is a very important skill in life. We were a little sleepy during our final two qualification matches on Sunday, but we still got picked by the eighth alliance captain, team 4909. After lunch, we participated in another tradition: the human player game. Everyone sent out team members instead of robots onto the field, where they raced to stack power cubes for a trophy.

We are looking forward to our next offseason competition, Beantown Blitz, next October.

This week, a group of LigerBots went to the Newton Cemetery to plant over 600 flags on the graves of veterans. On Sunday we will  march with our 2016 and 2018 robots in the Newton Memorial Day parade. We are grateful to have these two opportunities to remember our fellow citizens who served our country in the armed forces.

BattleCry 19 will be hosted by WPI this weekend and 60 FIRST Robotics teams (including us!) will be there. There are always rule twists, which make this fun. This off-season competition is likely our last for the year so if you want to watch in person, we will be there all day Saturday and Sunday.  Hours for matches are 10:15 am Saturday to about 7pm and Sunday 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. You can also watch live on Blue Alliance or  the NEFirst Red Channel on Twitch TV. Details can be found here .    The expected list of teams is here and you can check rankings here and our upcoming match schedule here.

The LigerBots had their best performance yet at the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) World Championship in Detroit this weekend finishing 6th out of 68 teams in the Daly division and advancing to the Division Semifinals before falling to the eventual world champion team. This is the LigerBots’ tenth season and the fourth time they have advanced to the World Championship, each time advancing farther than before.

Thirty-three LigerBots students plus a number of coaches, mentors and parents made the “LigerTrek” to Detroit this weekend to compete with over 400 FRC teams from around the world. The FIRST World Festival also included 128 teams competing in the FIRST Tech Challenge and over 100 FIRST Lego League teams including the Day Dragons, a team of four students from Day Middle School and and two from Pierce.

The FRC competition consisted of two full days of qualification matches in which each team competed in 10 matches. The LigerBots lost only one match, finishing with a 9-1 record which put them in 6th place overall in their division. This was the third best showing for the New England delegation which included 37 teams that advanced to the championship out of over 200 teams in New England.

The LigerBots captained the 6th alliance for the division playoffs on Daly, adding Team 188 Blizzard from Toronto, Canada, FRC 1024, Kil-A-Bytes from Lawrence, IN and FRC 4308 Absolute from Mississauga, Ontario. They won their quarterfinals match and advanced to the semifinals, but did not move on to the finals. The alliance they lost to in the semi-finals won the Daly Field competition and ultimately the entire competition.

A lot goes in to these matches: a skilled and level-headed “drive team,” the ability to partner with other teams to decide what each of the 3 robots on an alliance will do in a specific match and of course a capable robot. Also critical is the scouting that team members do by watching matches and identifying specific robots with complementary abilities at alliance selection time.

Alongside the competition there were seminars, a “scholarship alley” with tables from colleges all over the country, and an innovation fair with self-driving delivery vehicles, advanced medical technology and other exhibits from companies interested in engaging students interested in STEM.

Newton’s Day Dragons FLL team presented a seminar on “Applying Agile Principles to Your FIRST Lego League Team” which was well-received, and the students impressed the audience as they took part in a panel discussion following the presentation.

The LigerBots spoke to teams around the world about the ways they inspire and engage their community in learning about (and having fun with) STEM. In addition, they spoke to teams about their use of 3D printing and encouraged submissions to their 3D printed part competition which they created 3 years ago to celebrate the creative ways teams solve problems with 3D printing.

The LigerBots were excited to be a part of this event, and appreciate the community and corporate fundraising support that allowed the team to include as many students as were able to go. After some sleep and catching up on homework, the Team will be competing May 19th in BattleCry at WPI (a post-season competition).

We are competing in 10 qualifying rounds on Thursday and Friday (April 26th and 27th) on Daly Field. On Saturday, the winning alliance from each of the six fields will play in a roundrobin on the fabled Einstein Field. The six fields are: Archimedes, (Rachel) Carson, (Marie) Curie, (Marie) Daly, Darwin & Tesla. You can watch the livestream on Twitch TV or the Blue Alliance (which also has rankings and updated estimates of match times.  We are FRC 2877.