Free, hands-on activities for kids will be offered by 27 local organizations at the LigerBots STEAM Expo, Sat., Dec. 14, 10–3 at Newton North High School! The expo accompanies the Massachusetts-East  FIRST LEGO League Championship, hosted by the LigerBots. Come watch the tournament! Bring Drive a robot and climb on a fire truck! For more information visit  https://ligerbots.org/fll. To sign up to exhibit or to see the list of exhibitors visit  https://ligerbots.org/steam-expo.

On sunny Sunday, September 29th, the LigerBots attended Newtonville Village Day, the City’s largest annual village day. Many organizations and businesses, including local politicians, from Newton and the surrounding towns were there running booths with activities, sharing information, selling food, playing music, and performing dances.

We brought our 2022 competition robot, which is always a big hit, and used it to play catch with the people there. We also answered questions about how the robot works and its various parts and pieces.

In addition, we featured various STEAM activities for children to engage with, including paper activities like origami and double pyramids. With our activities we aim to inspire young minds to appreciate and potentially pursue a STEM education.

The Newtonville Village Day event was amazing and fun for all who attended! We connected with many community members through conversations about our team and how it’s run, helping kids with the outreach activities and showing off our robot! Connections are always our goal at outreach events! We felt that we got people very interested in our team and robotics in general.

Stay tuned for more events happening in the near future including our FLL Championship at STEAM Expo on Saturday, December 14th at Newton North High School.

On September 29, 2024, the LigerBots, along with other FRC teams, came to the 2024 Cambridge Science Fair at Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.

We brought our 2024 season competition robot and showed off its features to the public. Our  robot also tossed out pieces from the 2024 season game.

The kids in attendance had great fun catching and “feeding” circular pieces back to the robot.

In addition, LigerBots ran several STEAM-related activities for kids. These activities consist of learning science, creating 3D figures out of origami, and crafting bracelets to teach basic binary code, used in programming.

There were many tables and booths offering STEAM activities at the fair, so kids could get and make all kinds of awesome projects as they traveled around the square.

Save the date for the FLL Championship and STEAM Expo on Saturday, December 14th at Newton North!

With about 100 kids and adults in attendance, the LigerBots successfully promoted a love of STEAM at Countryside Elementary’s Back to School Picnic on September 9th.

Eight team members attended the event, and ran an event table with three big-hit STEAM activities: Origami, Binary Beads, and Skeleton Handprint.  Roughly 45 kids came to visit the table!  Each of the activities helped elementary schoolers learn skills in science, engineering, and arts while creating cool projects they could bring home.

The LigerBots connected with many students who might be interested in joining the LigerBots in the future!

The team also brought the 2022 robot and displayed it for the kids and their families. There was a lot of interest and community building done at the picnic and many people were intrigued by the robot.

Although we experienced technical difficulties with the robot not working, we overcame this challenge by explaining to kids and families why every part of the robot is useful and why it is necessary.

On Saturday, September 21, the LigerBots hosted the first ever FRC RoboCon NE at WPS.  With many amazing speakers presenting, the event was a smashing success!

Many students and mentors volunteered to assist during the event and in the days leading up to it.  RoboCon would not have been possible without their help.

During one of the morning presentations, three members of the Gongoliers (FRC 5112) talked about their team’s organizational structure. Attendees learned about their skill badge system, where team members are awarded badges for doing things on the team and their department system where certain branches of the team fall into categories.

Keynote speaker, Robin Saitz, the former Chief Marketing Officer at Rockwell Automation, and a longtime sponsor of the LigerBots, talked about her experience working at a variety of companies such as Raytheon, GTE, PTC, Brainshark, Avecto, Plex, and Rockwell. She is also a founding mentor of our team.

Adrienne Clark, our second keynote speaker, is the Director of Engineering Operations at Re:Build Fikst.  Adrienne talked about learning from failure, in which she gave a presentation about famous failures in the past and what went wrong.  She also suggested ways to improve in the workspace to prevent failure and be successful.

Other presentations included an alumni panel about how FIRST influences lives and careers, a race car building workshop by ALARM Robotics (FRC 2079), a presentation by Carly Buchanan and Dan Lavoie about mechanism design, a speech by Tufts student Hang Yu about learning, and a speech about efficiency by Blake Bourque.  The presentations were all very deep and fascinating with many thoughtful questions asked by attendees.  

We hope to host this event again next year and for many more years to come!