On Saturday January 27, 2024, The LigerBots CTO Julia and Coach Greer visited the girl scouts at Norwood Church of God. The LigerBots members brought an unfinished outreach robot, so that they could teach the girl scouts the designing process on how to transform a piece of metal into a finished robot, which they explained with a presentation. For the rest of the day, Coach Greer and Julia would help the girl scouts finish their project of building a vibrated robot. LigerBots member Julia quotted, “I think it went really well. The people were very appreciative of what we did. Yeah. The girls were really cute, hopefully I inspired them to be robotic nerds”.

Last Saturday, January 6, at the WPS Institute, The LigerBots kicked off its 2024 FIRST Robotics Season for this year’s FRC game, Crescendo! This will be The LigerBots’ 16th season participating in FRC. 

That Saturday, the team launched its annual three day design process. This activity brings every team member and mentor, no matter what their specialty on the team, into the engineering process, and leaves us all with an improved ability to brainstorm, negotiate, organize, and present our ideas.

On day one, our team split up into seven cohorts discussing and developing robot game strategy, crunching numbers of cycles times and point-values. Across the different spaces in the WPS building, fervent discussions were heard and whiteboards were filled with ideas. 

After six hard working hours, each group presented their strategy proposals in front of the whole team. All the ideas were taken into consideration and pros and cons were discussed by everyone on the team. 

Sunday, on the first snowy day of the year, groups met online to brainstorm and draft mechanisms to achieve the goals discussed on Saturday. Even snow cannot stop the LigerBots passion for robotics! 

Monday was a continuation of Sunday’s design process, finalizing ideas within groups in preparation for the mechanism presentation which were presented to the team the next day. 

Tuesday was when we did mechanism presentations of our prototype designs and did full team discussions.

On December 16th, The LigerBots hosted the FIRST Lego League (FLL) Eastern Massachusetts State Championships, a competition using Lego robots built by students from grade 4-8 passionate about robotics, at Newton North High School. Alongside the championship, the LigerBots also hosted a public STEAM Expo that brought together 48 teams and around 1000 people attended, the event also included the STEAM Expo where many STEAM activities were conducted to educate and immerse children in STEAM.

The FLL Championship was a competition as well as a public event, inviting politicians such as Congressman Jake Auchincloss. Many children along with their parents as well as the FLL teams were able to enjoy both the FLL competition and STEAM Expo.

“The kids loved the expo, especially the slime.” said Timothy, student manager of the STEAM Expo.

Many first years on the team experienced teaching younger kids in the form of running STEAM activities all throughout the event.

“It was really exciting to see the look on the children’s faces when they begin to see the correlation between the activity and STEAM.” said Andrew, first year member on LigerBots.

In the competition gym, there was an exciting atmosphere as the teams focused on their matches. There was a lot of gracious professionalism and coordination shown.

“While I was MCing I was noticing how coordinated all the teams were and the gracious professionalism and communication the kids had with each other. I believe all awards given were definitely deserved.” said Davis, former CMO of LigerBots.

We congratulate the Goofy Gyros especially as they move on to the World FLL Championships after they won both the FLL qualifier and championship we hosted.

LigerBots congratulates all the teams who made it to nationals and a big thank you to all the teams who attended!

The LigerBots will host a STEAM activity expo for children and robot zoo on Dec. 16 from 10-3 at Newton North High School, accompanying the Massachusetts East FIRST LEGO League Championship, which runs from 9-4. The entire event is free and open to the public.

Last Saturday, November 18 at Newton North High School, the LigerBots hosted the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Newton Qualifier, a competition using LEGO robots built by elementary and middle schoolers passionate about robotics. The LigerBots have hosted FLL tournaments since 2008, and the team was excited to continue hosting in 2023. LEGOs and robots in every corner of the building, booming voices of the MC announcing matches, 14 FLL teams, and 70 LigerBot students working hard to run this show certainly made Newton North very lively last Saturday. FLL team projects on this year’s FIRST theme of the arts filled the cafeteria.

The LigerBots set up a booth on Newton North’s Main Street corridor, showcasing their 2022 competition robot, and two hands-on STEAM activities: making custom buttons and origami pieces. The kids enjoyed interacting with the robot, a machine that could shoot giant tennis balls for them to catch, and overall it was a great way to entertain the attendees with STEAM demonstrations.

The qualifier concluded with an awards ceremony and a fun dance party. All four teams from Newton received an award: Cookie Coders (Innovation Project first place), Voltage (Innovation Project second place), New England Code Crackers (Core Values first place) and The First Layer (Judges Award). 

Of the 14 FLL teams that attended, six teams advanced to the state finals: 52042 Goofy Gyros, 52438 Mechanical Madness, 55783 Cookie Coders, 56378 New England Code Crackers, 57499 Acton Avengers, and 60562 The Mind Coders. Two of these teams are from Newton, the Cookie Coders and New England Code Crackers. These teams will compete at the upcoming Massachusetts FLL Championship which will be divided between competitions at WPI and at Newton North.

If you thought last weekend was fun, come visit us on December 16th from 9am-4pm, for the MA FLL Championship at Newton North High School, also run by the LigerBots. Come watch the 48 FLL teams compete head-to-head and check out our STEAM Expo, run alongside the competition. At the STEAM Expo, from 10am-3pm, kids and attendees have the opportunity to engage in a large variety of hands-on STEAM activities, explore a number of local organizations’ booths, and interact with bigger robots from FIRST Robotics Competition and FIRST Tech Challenge. This event is free and open to the public!