St Bees Village Primary School

First Lego League

Over the last few months, ten of our Year 5 and Year 6 children have been working hard to prepare for our second entry into the FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL®).

FIRST^® LEGO^® League is a global science and technology challenge for teams of students, to encourage an interest in real world issues and develop key skills that are crucial for their future careers. The students work together to explore a given topic and to design, build and program an autonomous LEGO robot to solve a series of missions.

FLL is for young people aged 9 to16 years, working in teams of up to ten students with a supporting adult coach. Each year FLL releases a new challenge for the teams. The challenge involves a robot game and a research project, and students will need to demonstrate the FLL core values throughout all their work.  For more information go to: http://firstlegoleague.theiet.org

Our team who competed in the regional tournament called themselves the 'Water Saving Winners'.  Here is their logo, it was created by combining designs from Lily and Georgia.

Preparing

Before the tournament, the team worked on three different areas:

• their project;
• building the lego (including designing a robot); and
• programming the robot.

Their project

The team had to come up with a real life problem involving water and a solution for it.  The problem they chose was people having to pay groundwater charges to take away grey water and then pay for water to flush toilets.  Their solution was to catch the rainwater, filter it and use it for toilets. 

Building the lego

We spend many hours (and weeks) following the instructions to make all of the models for the challenges and work out what our robot needed to be able to do to complete the challenges. 

Programming the robot

Once our robot was ready, we had to programme it to complete the different tasks.  We chose to try the filter, water well and pump addition challenges.  We also looked at the pipe replacement challenge, but didn't quite finish the programming.

Thanks

We were also very lucky to have mentors from Ultra Electonics coming in to help us in class, Ross, John and Kev.  They helped us to work on our project, build our lego, program the robot and supported us at the tournament.

Our VSA kindly funded t-shirts to help us to feel like a 'real team'; they featured a version of our logo and our names.

Finally thank you to Vivien, from Vivvy Lees in Whitehaven, for transforming our logo into the final version and producing our wonderful t-shirts.

Here are some of the photographs of us preparing.

Competing

On Wednesday 17th January, we went to St Bees school to compete in our regional tournament.  There were 12 teams taking part from local primary and secondary schools.  In the morning we had three goes at the robot challenge against other teams (along with some extra refining of our programming between rounds).  Our robot did really well, competing two challenges completely and nearly completing a third.

In the afternoon we were interviewed about our robot, then we presented our project to a group of judges before being tested on our Core Values. 

The feedback we received from the judges was wonderful and we won the category of 'Core Values'!

All of the children worked really hard as a group and were a credit to themselves and the school.

We won the trophy for the Core Values.  The FIRST Lego League website explains the core values as (from http://www.firstlegoleague.org/about-fll#block-block-13):