Good news – the FIRST Lego League Challenge is back for its third year, thanks to kind sponsorship by Ford Motor Company.

 

INTECH Science Centre and Planetarium has the third 'FIRST Lego League Challenge' Hampshire final booked for Thursday 11th December. The theme this year is Climate Connections, which looks at problems caused or exacerbated by local climate, and finding solutions to these problems. The teams have to build and program their robot to complete a number of missions within two and a half minutes, research a climate issue, develop a solution and share the results with another community facing a similar problem, discuss the technical design of their robot, and work together as a team.   

Several SEAs are involved, as team mentors in school throughout the autumn term, and as judges, referees and marshals on the day.

On Tuesdays 9th and 16th September, we had introductory sessions to get this year's teams off to a flying start. We will be running a troubleshooting meeting at the beginning of November. We are just about full at the time of writing, but get in touch if you would like to know more, and perhaps get your name on the list for next year's Challenge.

 

School comments after the 2007 final

Thank you for a great day, we really enjoyed ourselves and the students are eager to enter again!!

Phil White, Crookhorn College of Technology

 

I just want to thank you at Intech as our students all had a very good day and really enjoyed themselves. Our boys are already planning on building and getting into the intricacies of programming in a much deeper way before next year!

Jo Davies, Perins School

 

Torill gave her class a half an hour long presentation on it all this morning. I think there will be at least three more teams competing next year! The teacher in charge of making the classroom education more relevant to industry also sat in and asked me lots of questions afterwards. Their inset day last Friday was about the need for schools to teach the kids all the skills that this scheme is designed to encourage.

 The kids also asked some great questions. The fact that no single person did the whole of any part was difficult for them to grasp.  

 Allison Johnson, IQ Busters team manager

 

Just a note to say how much we enjoyed ourselves yesterday and to offer

many thanks to you and your team at INTECH. It really was a pleasure to

see the children so engrossed and fired up by what they had to do.

Andrew Sharpe, Ringwood Junior School.

 

Judges comments

Thoroughly enjoyed the day, lovely to see so many enthusiastic young people prepared to put so much effort into an extra curricula activity. Quite an achievement for all your staff to organise so many children on one day. Congratulations to everybody.

Jim Payne

 

I really enjoyed the day. It was great to see what the kids achieved in the few months they had been working on it. It was also encouraging to hear how some teams when faced with technical difficulties at the last minute still managed to come up with a working solution on the day. This is what engineering is about!

Ken Haines, Thales Group, Teamwork judge

 

 

A later response from the IQ Busters coach, after telling us the lad in the team had been teased at school, with other children singing the Duplo song at him;

 

The hassle the boy had had school has been outweighed in admiration from other kids who obviously have found out about the FLL and who value just what the kids have done. Andrew is keeping it all close to his chest but judging by how much his confidence has grown in the last few days I guess that things are very positive. There certainly seems to be a different atmosphere around him. Perhaps it is related to how the non-IQ Busters have responded or perhaps he is in a group of outsiders and has learnt from their response how to respond in a better way. I don't know. All I know is that my children have changed in the last week and I like where they are going and value what taking part in the FLL has done for them.

 

I am also conscious of the fact that my style of coaching played an important part. i.e. understanding the FLL values and teaching the children to know and believe in themselves and each other so that they can work according to them and effectively coach themselves and each other. I have passed the credit onto those who taught me.

Allison Johnson, IQ Busters