More Lego Robotics Success!

Thursday 2nd March 2017

Last Sunday, the Lego Robotics team set off for the University of the West of England for the FIRST Lego League UK and Ireland Final.

Having won their regional heat, Team HCS were full of confidence and a great deal of work had been put in since the victory in Newbury to further improve the robot, as well as preparing two new presentations required for the final and improving a third.

The exhibition centre in Bristol was enormous and the size surprised the team when they arrived. 48 teams from the UK and Ireland were there to try and be crowned champions and go forward to the international final in the USA this summer.

During the day, the team set up their pit area to highlight their project topic and then completed 3 robot games, a ‘core values’ session which focussed on the team work and collaboration shown by the team, a robot design session where the team presented the innovative programming and robot building they had completed, as well as a project presentation based on this year’s ‘Animal Allies’ theme.

The team were excited to be featured on the FIRST Lego League’s live TV stream a number of times, where they were interviewed and featured during the games and when working in the pit areas. Harry was even invited into the on-site TV studio where he commentated on the third of the robot games for the live stream.

The team were complemented on their work on core values where the judges were impressed at the wide age range and inclusion shown by the team. They felt that the robot had some very complex coding and showed innovative design, with the pneumatic lift device proving most popular!

Whilst the robot was not on it’s best behaviour on the day, the team achieved tenth place overall out of the 48 teams, which everyone was very happy with. The team have learned a lot of important lessons which will help improve reliability next year – they are already talking about ideas for Steve#3!

Well done to all involved: Bilol, Harry, Laurence (coach), Archie, Abubakr, Noah, Sam, Alexa, Hamza, Max and Jake.