A team from Robert Bakewell school in Loughborough reached the final of the annual First Lego League competition last weekend. This is an engineering competition aimed at older primary school kids to get them thinking about important themes like climate change, transport or (this year) medical science.
Although the final was held right here at Loughborough University on Saturday the competition is national - the winners were from a school in Galway in Ireland - so reaching the final is a brilliant effort, after all over 400 schools orginally entered.
The programmable Lego Mindstorms system is used as the medium to challenge the to find solutions to problems laid out on a large tabletop, such as mending a broken bone (moving a Lego "splint" over two other pieces of Lego representing the bone). All the teams have exactly the same challenges on the same table layout, and they have to build their robot to do the best job.
The winning team now can compete for a place in the world final in the USA!
To get your school involved next year visit http://firsthandtechnology.org.uk/
