Lego Masters

On Saturday 30 November, six boys embarked on a mission to qualify for the nationals of the First Lego League competition against 25 other team in our region. The First Lego League is a global competition with upwards of 312,000 students competing across 100+ countries. Needless to say, it is a big deal!

Within the competition, you have to complete in four components, each worth 25% to obtain an overall grade. They are:

• to research an innovation project and present this as a skit (5 minutes) to the judges
• complete a core values activity
• design, build and code a robot to complete missions
• compete on the game table to score points

The boys created an idea to have a hire-to-ride bike system linked to the student's Flexischool account and using fingerprint technology to release the bike and automatically charge the user (at a pro-rata rate). The team presented their skit as a Shark Tank idea and yes, there was a boy in a dress!

They completed the core values activity, in which they firstly figured out where Scotch was and identify the top three bird species within our locality. Needless to say, there was a bit of laughter from the boys. The task was designed to see how the boys worked together as a team. We can say that the boys did an outstanding job.

Next, the boys were critiqued on the robot design and coding. All of the boys had the code printed and explained; therefore, the boys demonstrated an excellent knowledge of their code. Their robot design was compact and functional, demonstrating durability with all attachments and limited breakdowns.

Finally, the most exciting component of the day. Running our bot on the game board in front of family, friends and other schools. We were first on the board and set a high score of 315 points, which to our surprise kept us in 1st position at the end of round one. In our second run, with 2 seconds remaining, we nailed our final mission to set a high score of 335 and improve our position at the top of the leaderboard. In our last run, we had a slip up but some excellent decision making from our boys maintained a score of 275, which demonstrated their ability to cooperate under stress! The boys finished in 1st position for this component.

Overall, we finished first in Robot Performance in the robot game itself with our top score of 335 and we also finished first in Gracious Professionalism, demonstrating their ability to be gracious in all facets of the game.

In the end, we came with a mission to qualify for the nationals. We are happy to announce that we have progressed to the nationals at Curtin University on Saturday 14 December.

A big well done to Brenn Armstrong, Jack Ashby, Zachary Blakey, Leon Hugo, Abe Prendiville and Luca Regli.