LEGO ROBOTICS – REGIONAL FINALS

Our journey to the Regional Finals of the First Lego League competition had begun at the start of the Christmas term. This annual competition involves building and programming a Lego robot capable of completing a series of tasks, as well as developing a solution to a real-world problem. This year, the theme was ‘City Shapers’, so we needed to think of a solution to a problem in our locality as well as building a robot capable of completing as many of the challenges as we could in the robot game.
To start with, we split the people in the Lego Robotics club into two teams. One team did the building and programming of the robot and the other team worked on the city living project. We started this project by thinking about the problems in cities and about ways to tackle them. We chose to focus on homelessness and the possibility of using empty shops and buildings in Warminster to help ease the problem.
After coming up with our initial ideas, we continued to make steady progress on both the robot and the project. To get the best possible robot design, we split into two sub-teams to build and test different robots. It was only after evaluating the capabilities of both robots that we were able to decide which one was best suited to the challenge tasks.
When the robot was finally finished, we moved onto finishing the project with the deadline for completion rapidly approaching. On the day of the competition in January, we left bright and early for the venue next to the University of West England in Bristol. We started doing our last-minute preparations before entering the main hall for the briefing and from there we competed throughout the day, including a judged presentation of our project and three runs in the robot game. We finished with mid-table respectability; not quite as successful as last year – and with plenty to work on for next year – but it was a great day nevertheless.
Team members: Felix, Archie, Maisie, Ed, Harry, (all Year 9) Toby, Archie, Jack, Finn and Alex (all Year 8).
Felix, Maisie and Archie, Year 9