Lego League

This was our first year taking part and we faced some really tough competition from other primary and secondary schools. We participated in the tournament at Willowtown Primary, Ebbw Vale, where we were the youngest team to compete. The First Lego League promotes a number of important core values:

Our first step was for the team to come up with their name and to assign individual roles. After that, we set about working together to build all of the models needed for the different challenges, as well as fixing them to the mat.

Our next step was to design and build our robot, as well as decide on an 'innovation project' involving sustainable energy. We decided to look at using solar panels to run our stage lighting. We looked at how much energy the stage lights need and what that costs. We then looked at how much energy could be generated by a single solar panel. We went on to research how many solar panels we would need to run all of our stage lighting. It was a really interesting project and we learned a lot about renewable energy.

We had to work really hard to understand the code for the robot. It took us a long time to get it to do more than just spin around in circles! Once we understood the basics, we looked at which of the challenges we felt we would be able to do and started planning the code.

On the day of the competition, we had three opportunities to take part in the robot challenge (best score out of the three tries would be our final score). We also had to present our work to the judges and talk about when we had learned. The judges were very impressed with our presentation and gave us some ideas of things we could add to our robot for next year.

We were able to take part this year thanks to a grant from the IET. The grant covered the costs of our competition models and our entry fee for the tournament.

We are hoping to find sponsorship that will allow us to participate again next year!