Help the LigerBots Get to the World Championship in Detroit!

Newton’s LigerBots, like any sports team, never know ahead of time which year is going to be a good one for them, and which one will be a washout. Key players and coaches come and go, and the game is a bit different every year, requiring constant adjustments to strategy. Injuries can cause the team to be sidelined at crucial moments. Victories are celebrated with medals, banners, and people lined up for a parade of high-fives and handshakes.

But for the LigerBots, along with the world’s 7300 other FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams, the injuries are not to humans, and the victories are not for human physical strength or skill. They are all about the robots. Injuries are repairable with a wrench or a screwdriver, and victories are earned by students being smart, adaptable, and ready to learn how to excel in the “sport of the mind,” a robot game that is different every year.

The LigerBots, along with high school robotics teams from all over the world, have six weeks, a materials budget of about $4000 and a fighting-weight limit of 120 lbs within which to build a new robot that can play the current year’s game. It’s a six-week frenzy of power tools, purchase orders, blog posts and flyer designs. And when the six weeks are up, the robot goes into a big plastic bag and can’t be touched until competition.

When those bags finally get opened, two alliances of three robots each compete on a playing field the size of a basketball court. One year the robots might be required to lift a stack of totes; another year, to throw balls into a small hole; a third year, to shoot Frisbees at a target. Robots may climb up ramps and ropes, or pass game pieces back and forth between them. At the annual game kickoff, the student engineers have to be ready for anything. This year the game is all about lifting milk crates onto a big see-saw. As the LigerBots will tell you, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

But, this year, the LigerBots have played the sport of the mind so well that they are going to the FRC World Championship in Detroit from April 25-28. The team’s 24th-place ranking out of 209 New England teams at the finish of the April 11-14 New England District District Championship, plus FIRST Robotics awards for Imagery and Engineering Inspiration won at the District level, have earned the LigerBots the right to join 400 other FRC teams from around the world in Detroit. (Another 400 teams will compete April 19-21 in Houston, and the winners of each competition will battle it out in New Hampshire over the summer to determine the world champions.) In addition, the LigerBots won the world-wide FIRST Safety Animation competition back in January and have had the pleasure of knowing their safety animation will be projected for the audience at the start of every FRC competition around the world this season.

The LigerBots have been around for ten years now, getting smarter, and more adaptable each year. This combined Newton North (tigers) and South (lions) team has grown to include about sixty students and twenty-four volunteer mentors with skill sets ranging from mechanical engineering to software, from graphic design to finance. The team has professed a goal to be the leader in project-based learning in Newton and, toward that end, attends or runs thirty STEM outreach events each year, fixes shop equipment in both of their high schools, runs a 3D printing contest, keeps in constant communication with Newton government leaders, and organizes training seminars in many technical and business skills for Newton high school students. They run two FIRST LEGO League competitions each year, which include maker fairs, at Newton North High School. You can see them at many Newton village days and the Newton Memorial Day parade, as well as at many other events.

Now the team is on a planning and fundraising blitz to help its members get to the World Championship. The LigerBots have always depended upon corporate sponsors and individual donors to keep the team afloat, but travel to Worlds is always a challenge for them. The team, which has qualified for the World Championship three times in the past five years, always learn they have qualified only ten or so days before the event begins, and have to scramble to raise funds for a bus and hotel rooms. They want to make sure that every LigerBot who wants to go with them has the chance to make the trip.

First they need $5,000 for the competition registration fee, and are then hoping they can fundraise the $15,000 for a bus (2 days each way to Detroit).

If you’d like to help out, visit https://ligerbots.org/sponsor, message the team on Facebook, or email sponsor-relations@ligerbots.org if you are a corporate sponsor.