Wellesley Town Parade

On Sunday, May 19th, LigerBots marched in the Wellesley town parade alongside Ultraviolet, Wellesley’s high school robotics team.

Once again, Ultraviolet invited us to march alongside them in the Wellesley Memorial parade! We each brought our competition robot from this year’s season, and displayed them and their functionality in front of the excited crowds lining the street.

Our float won the Wellesley parade Chairman’s Award!! After the parade ended, students from both teams hung out in Wellesley’s town center and enjoyed delicious ice cream from Truly’s.

Memorial Day Flag Planting

On Wednesday, May 22nd, to honor our fallen soldiers, the LigerBots, along with members of the Sons of the Legion and Women’s Auxilary from the American Post 440, as well as several boy scouts, planted American flags at the Newton Cemetery. Each flag planted next to the gravestones marks the selfless sacrifices American soldiers made to protect this country. All gave some. Some gave all.

Memorial Day Parade

On Sunday May 26th, the LigerBots participated in Newton’s annual memorial day parade event. Thousands of people attended, with tens of companies featured in the parade! We walked from Newton North High School on Walnut St to Coletti-Magni Park on Watertown St. with lots of cheering and applause along the way. There were many stands and activities along the route as well as with free popcorn and ice cream! Overall we honored our veterans, engaged with the public, and had a great experience!

This was a very enjoyable parade and we hope to see all of our community members at future events!

We are promoting activities to make kids healthier! On Saturday, May 11, LigerBots joined the YMCA healthy kids event to teach kids about STEAM. 

Exercising the brain is just as important as exercising any other muscle. Besides playing catch with our 2022 robot, kids engaged in our STEAM activities using origami, balloon cars, and a human robot to learn concepts of math, physics, and logic in an entertaining way!

Our STEAM activity, balloon cars, teaches kids the basics of engineering from building a car from recycled materials. We hope we can continue attending this event in future years to help make kids healthier!

 

On the evening of Thursday, May 2nd, The LigerBots went to the science fair at Lincoln Eliot elementary school where we showed off our 2022 competition robot and several of our very own STEAM activities to Lincoln Eliot students and families. 

The main attraction, as always, was our 2022 competition robot, Prometheus. Prometheus is our robot that shoots large sized tennis balls that are fed in through the back, as Elliot is doing here. Then the driver, in this case Anushka, presses a button and the balls fire.

One of our activities we showed off was the solar oven, an activity in which crayons are melted under an extraordinarily powerful heat source, usually the sun. In this case, we mock the energy of the sun with a sun lamp. 

In our human robot activity, a student or LigerBots team member gives directions for a blindfolded participant to navigate through a maze filled with cones. These directions mock computer code, like “turn right 90 degrees” or “walk four steps forward.” It turns Scratch into real life!

We also did origami at this event. Origami is the art of folding paper into many different shapes. The particular shape we made here is called a double pyramid.  Here, Jack is making the double pyramid for a child at the event.

Finally, we did one of our long-running activities: binary bracelets. In this activity, participants write their initials in beads representing binary, the language of 0s and 1s that computers use. By the end, they are not only introduced to computer binary but they also have a nerdy bracelet to take home!

Everyone had a very good time at our Lincoln Eliot elementary STEAM expo. We look forward to more amazing events like this!

After competing at tough qualifying events and the NE District Championship, we headed to the FIRST World Championship for the first time in six years! For four thrilling days from April 17th to 20th, 2024, we teamed up with 600 FRC teams from all over the world at Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center for an exciting competition and exploration!

Before our highly anticipated trip, we dove straight into preparations. One day was dedicated to packing every inch of our coach’s car and trailer with our robot, its components, pit equipment, spirit supplies and more. On another day, team members poured countless hours into assembling buttons, producing over a thousand by hand! Some team members even dyed their hair orange in demonstration of LigerBots team spirit!

Early on Wednesday of April 16th, the LigerBots flew from Boston to Houston, meeting other New England teams along the way. Upon landing in the humid Houston climate, it was all hands on deck as we immediately got to work. We set up our pit, calibrated our robot for inspection, played in practice matches, and prepared match scouting strategies. 

After the championship’s commencement, our team was placed into a division of 75 teams, with 124 intense qualifiers. Our division, Johnson, was named after NASA scientist Katherine Johnson. Following two days of qualifiers, we ended ranked 6th out of 75 teams, an unbelievable feat that allowed us to become the 5th seed alliance captain. Throughout the competition, our strategy team thoroughly analyzed scouting data, leading to our selection of three teams to be on our alliance: Nashoba Robotics #1768, ROBOTZ Garage #4451, and ICRobotics #5584, interestingly an Australian team. Our playoff matches proved tough, but unfortunately we were eliminated after losing our matches by a narrow margin. 

Alongside the competition, the FIRST Championship was a place for exploration. Some team members walked around 600 FRC pits, collecting dozens of pounds of pins. Others explored the simultaneous FTC and FLL competitions, particularly to cheer on the FLL team such as the Goofy Gyros, an outstanding team that competed at both FLL tournaments that we hosted in the fall. During downtime, team members scattered around the tens of dozens of booths at the Innovation Expo, including colleges and leading tech companies.

After the competition, we made the most of the Houston trip. We explored the Johnson Space Center, FRC Team 118, the Robonauts’s open house, and the nearby aquarium. What a great end to such an experience!

This wraps up our 2024 competition season…wow what an incredible season. As we approach the spring, we are jumping straight into our off-season, attending many more outreach events, working on offseason projects, and gearing up for the 2024-2025 year. 

The LigerBots played strongly at the New England District Championship in West Springfield from April 3-6.

On Thursday and Friday, 96 qualification rounds were held. With one of the hardest schedules out of all teams, the LigerBots was 7th Alliance’s first pick during alliance selection for playoffs on Saturday. Along with our alliance captain 1699 Robocats and alliance partner 88 TJ2, they scored the highest number of points in the whole competition, during playoffs, reaching an astounding 147 points in one round!

At our last competition, the Greater Boston Event in Revere, we won the FIRST Impact Award, the most prestigious award in FIRST. Winning this award got us invited to present our Impact Award presentation at the District Championship. During the presentation, judges paused their timer and the presentation team had to pause as an earthquake shook the room. 

“Their presentation was Earth-shaking!” joked head coach John Fitzpatrick.

Throughout this three day championship, the team competed for Engineering Inspiration Award, which gave us the opportunity to display a booth at expo along with other teams competing for Engineering Inspiration. Our booths displayed various hands-on STEAM activities, as well as our 2022 competition robot shooting large tennis balls for bypassers to catch!

“Despite the difficulty of our match schedule, we did really well overall, and I’m excited to watch the team improve by DCMP next year” commented COO Charlotte S.