On Wednesday 13th March, 7 students from Years 7 & 8 took part in the regional tournament for the FIRST® LEGO® League at the University of Bradford’s Engineering Department. The team was competing for the exciting chance to represent their region at the FIRST® LEGO® League UK and Ireland Final, and potentially go on to take part in the World Festival in the USA.
The tournament is the culmination of weeks of preparation, where the students have worked in teams to design, build and programme a robot, using a LEGO® Spike/Mindstorms® kit, to create an innovative solution to a real-world problem. This year’s MASTERPIECE robot game is about the technology that will improve an audience’s experience of a creative production. Points are scored by activating different types of technology. The experts involved in designing the shows and the audience members need to be delivered to various venues around the mat.
The Team from St Anselm’s acquitted themselves well in their first ever tournament, and considering they are a new team with no previous robot building experience they should be proud of their achievement to reach the regional final. The team already have plans on how to improve next year and hopefully win one of the awards.
The Team from Bradford Grammar School were crowned Overall Champions after impressing the judges with their amazing robot design and project idea. They will go through to compete against other regions in the UK and Ireland Final in June.
The First Lego League aims to introduce young people to technology and engineering in an exciting way, and develop the key skills that are crucial for their future careers.
The FIRST® LEGO® League is the world’s largest STEM competition with over 250,000 young people (in 32,000 teams) across more than 80 countries taking part. The IET are the operational partners in the UK and Ireland, where the FIRST® LEGO® League is part of a wider education programme that aims to inspire and attract the engineers of tomorrow. 47 FIRST® LEGO® League regional tournaments will be taking place across the UK and Ireland this year.
Well done to Sean, Ashton, Ted, Leo, Edward, Aranpreet and Nathan.
Mr B Witherspoon
STEM Coordinator
