On Sunday May 18th, we marched in the Wellesley Parade for the third year in a row with our friends from Wellesley, Ultraviolet (FRC team 8567).

Before the parade, we arrived early to pack our robot into the truck driven by a coach from Ultraviolet. We had some downtime before the parade started, so we socialized and enjoyed snacks brought by Ultraviolet. This was a good chance to connect with our friends and strengthen inter-team bonds.

While we were marching, Thaddeus shot playground balls for spectators to catch.
This was a great way to make ourselves entertaining and to spread an interest in robotics.

In addition to our team bringing Thaddeus, Ultraviolet also brought their robot. Together, Thaddeus and Ultraviolet’s robot looked great on display and the parade judges liked our float so much that we got the award for Best Youth Float for the second year in a row!

After the parade, we went to Truly’s Ice Cream in Wellesley Square with Ultraviolet. It was another nice opportunity to socialize and express our shared love of robotics. We hope to do this event again in future years!

On May 10th 2025, the LigerBots attended the Healthy Kids Day Event at the West Suburban YMCA. This event is designed to inspire kids to be healthy, active, and engaged.

We brought multiple STEAM activities to the event, one being our 2022 robot, where the robot’s driver shoots a playground ball for students to catch. We also brought some of our other popular STEAM activities, like binary beads and skeleton handprints.

Many students at the YMCA Healthy Kids Day event enjoyed our STEAM activities and engaging with the 2022 robot. In the near future, we plan to introduce our new outreach robot at events. This robot is almost done being tested.

Outreach season is a busy time for our team and we have a bunch of upcoming STEAM events! Coming up we have the Memorial Day Flag Planting on May 21st and Parade on May 25th. Hope to see you there!

On May 1st, the LigerBots brought STEAM activities and our 2022 robot to the Lincoln-Eliot Elementary School science fair. At the fair, elementary school students showcased their science projects and engaged in STEAM oriented student-led activities.

We brought our 2022 robot, which we are temporarily using while we finish building our outreach robot, specifically made for our outreach events, and also three STEAM activities including Binary Beads, Skeleton Handprints “X-Ray”, and Tangrams.

Many students at the fair were excited to see the robot and engaged with the STEAM activities. For the first time in a while, we brought Tangrams, which were popular alongside our other activities. Tangrams are puzzles where you first cut out shapes from a square piece of paper and then combine to create interesting figures.

Although it is a busy time of year for students due to AP exams and SATs, we were lucky to be able to get more than enough staffing and the event ended up being a success!

At the end of the Science Fair, pizza was available. We were happy to enjoy some pizza after our hard work at the event.

We hope to see you at one of our many upcoming outreach events including:
Town of Wellesley Parade where we’ll march with team Ultraviolet (Team 8567) from 12 pm to 3 pm on Sunday, May 18th, starting at 181 Washington St, Wellesley Hills, MA in Wellesley Square
Newton Memorial Parade on Sunday, May 25th, starting at Newton North High School at 3 pm and we will march until we reach Coletti-Magni Park

On April 28, 2025 the LigerBots participated in Green Newton’s fourth annual Earth Day Festival at Newton North High School. We brought our 2022 robot and multiple STEAM activities. Because the team was competing at the FIRST Championship in Houston, Texas, the Ligerbots had to miss last year’s Earth Day Festival – making them especially excited to participate in this year’s event.

The kids in attendance had fun creating origami shapes and parachutes, building kaleidoscopes, and making slime, which is always our most popular activity!. Both kids and adults enjoyed interacting and playing catch with one of our ball-throwing robots.

The Earth Day Festival is one of many outreach events that LigerBots attend to promote the benefits of STEAM to children.

Our STEAM activities are especially helpful in making scientific concepts like gravity, optics and geometry fun, hands-on and easier to understand. Despite the cloudy skies, this event was a great success!

From April 16-19, the LigerBots competed and volunteered at the FIRST World Championship in Houston, Texas. There were 600 FRC teams from all over the world at the competition this year, 75 of which were with us in the Hopper division. We were excited to be going to Worlds for the second time in a row and our sixth time ever in our 17 years competing!

After practice matches on Wednesday afternoon, we went into all-day qualifying matches on both Thursday and Friday. We won 5 out of 10 of our matches, landing us at rank 32 out of 75 before the playoffs. This left us in an uncertain position at the end of the day of whether or not we would get picked for playoffs.

Saturday morning arrived and we made it through alliance selection. Although we had to wait until the very end, we were picked by the number 1 ranked team, our good friends Nashoba Robotics (team 1768) from nearby Bolton, Massachusetts! Our other alliance mates were Stryke Force (team 2767) from Kalamazoo, Michigan and WorBots (team 4145) from Worthington, Ohio. Together, we fought through the playoff bracket, beat every alliance we were up against, and despite a scare after a loss in the first finals match, we won the next two matches, winning the best of three to become the Hopper Division winners, and getting to the Einstein Field for the FIRST TIME EVER!

Yes, we were super excited about getting to Einstein, but we still had to compete. In our first match, we were up against the Galileo alliance. We ended up losing and being sent to the lower bracket. Unfortunately, our robot was having problems so we had to sit out the next match and let our alternate team, the WorBots, take over. Although our robot was not competing, our alliance beat out the Archimedes alliance. Sadly, we lost the next match against the Curie alliance, which led to our alliance’s elimination. The Newton alliance ended up becoming this season’s world champions, and while we were not the champions, we were still very happy for this amazing season and our first ever trip to the Einstein Field.

In addition to our huge successes in this event, we also won awards! We won the Autonomous Award for the Hopper Division, which is given to a team with an outstanding autonomous design. We also won a blue banner for this season after winning our division. This was our third blue banner this season after winning the UNH event and Coach John Sangiolo receiving the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award.

This was certainly the best season that the LigerBots have ever had in our 17-year history! We look forward to playing next year’s game, Rebuilt! Until then, we have two offseason competitions coming up this spring. Stay tuned for the Massachusetts Championship on May 31 and BattleCry at WPI on June 7-8!