Digital Technologies

FIRST Lego League

The FIRST (For the Innovation and Recognition of Science and Technology) Lego League Regional competition was certainly a fun experience to remember. In the beginning, I was a little anxious but chose to come out of my comfort zone and do not regret the decision.

At the start of the semester, when this officially became a class, we didn’t know what to expect. With the little experience that our team had, did our best to listen to the advice of Mic Lowne, the head referee, learn the rules of the competition and use our class and after school sessions to be ready for the day. On the day, many of our competitors had attended the league before, therefore more experienced than us. I didn’t expect us to do too well.

We arrived at theatre, it was our time to setup and practice. The schedule of the day consisted of every team competing had 3 rounds of 2 ½ minutes to complete as many missions as possible. One of the missions we completed, was pushing out our ‘Wifi Tower’, which we designed to relate to this year’s City Shaper theme.

After round one, we scored 150 points but our run didn’t go according to plan. Our code disappeared from the robot for one of the missions. So we had to use our Wifi Tower code and hope that it worked. Surprisingly it did! We fixed the code for Round 2 and were shocked to discover that we were in second place on the ladder with 265 points, 80 points behind the team that won. I was ecstatic about seeing us around the top of the table.

In between the rounds we had to present our innovation project, robot design and Core Values. I was nervous when we were presenting our innovation project on freeing the trapped kangaroos in Mernda.

Once everyone was finished with the rounds and activities, we were all invited to dance on the stage, while the winners were being decided. When they announced the 3 teams that were competing in the next round, I was disappointed that our team didn’t make it. What could you expect from a team in its first year?

This is definitely something I want for our school to do again because it was a fun ride, we did better than I thought we would and I think we can get better next year.

By Kani