The LigerBots are excited to compete in the Bay State Brawl this Saturday! Bay State Brawl is an off-season event that allows teams to play last year’s FRC game for fun before the new game is announced. We will be leaving for Westborough High School at 6:45 a.m. We will begin unloading at 7:30 a.m. and leaving the event around 5:30 p.m. with the hope of returning by 6:30 p.m. All LigerBots are invited to participate and the public is invited to come watch!

The LigerBots spent the past week working to spread STEM in our community. Several LigerBots spent last Saturday assembling FLL field kits. FLL is the junior version of the FRC program, giving elementary and middle schoolers the chance to design, build, and program smaller robots to complete tasks for points. The LigerBots host two competitions for teams from around Massachusetts. Each of the assembled kits contains the components which make up this year’s FLL competition field, and the LigerBots are proud to contribute to this wonderful STEM opportunity.

On Tuesday the LigerBots hosted the first ever Girls + Tools event! The night was full of engineering challenges and building opportunities to inspire local middle and high school girls to get more involved in engineering opportunities in the community! Every attendee milled a smiley face out of metal stock, then wired and soldered LED lights for eyes. It was a fun night of introductions and building.

It was wonderful to meet team parents this past Wednesday at the LigerBots annual Parent Night! The LigerBots exec board members gave a presentation to new and returning parents to inform them about how the team runs and what to expect in the coming season.

As build season draws closer the team continues to push for more outreach and events. From encouraging young engineers to providing them the tools to become involved, the LigerBots are proud of being a voice for STEM in the community.

The LigerBots have been hard at work on our second robot in order to prepare for the Bay State Brawl off-season competition. This week we repaired a pneumatic leak and installed both a brand-new radio and a camera. At long last, the robot is ready to go—but that doesn’t mean our work is over.

One of our big preseason goals is to build an H-drive. We finished milling the frame today, and now we’re on to assembly. We also set up our our new team laptops for programming and did some soldering training.

The LigerBots continued preparation for our Girls + Tools! event, a hands-on workshop for girls 13-18 that we will host in the Newton South wood shop on Tuesday, Oct. 17 from 6:30pm to 8:30 p.m. We hope to introduce many girls to the fun of solving engineering problems in a low-pressure environment. Please see the announcements section of our website for more information. You can register here.

The LigerBots will be hosting a Parents’ Night in Newton North’s Film Lecture Hall on 10/18 at 7 p.m. We expect parents of both new and veteran members to attend this meeting. We will discuss plans for the upcoming year and what support we need from parents. Parents can also turn in CORI/SORI forms and signed student permission slips at this meeting. Please print them at home if you can. Permission slips can be found here.

We continue to make the most of our preseason. The business group is working to publicize our Girls Who Build event, coming up October 17th. Our programming group is fine tuning one of our robots for a preseason competition, the Bay State Brawl. Rookies are being taught to use our power tools and led to salvage parts by disassembling our 2017 competition robot to gain more understanding about what makes up an FRC robot. Other team members are working on CADing an image of a worm gear, to be 3D printed during the build season, and building a new control box to help us test different mechanisms.