A team of students working on a robotics project at Abbey Park School in Swindon is building up for the highly anticipated First Lego League (FLL) Challenge.
It will be held in Bristol on 27 February 2025.
The FLL is a global competition to inspire teams of young people to experiment and grow their critical thinking, coding, and design skills through hands-on science and technology learning and robotics.
The Abbey Park School team, which began building their Lego robots in September, has been working on this year’s FLL project centred around the theme of Submerged: An Underwater Robotics Challenge.
The FLL Challenge presents teams with a series of complex missions that require them to design, build, and programme robots. The students named their robot "Gilbert" and have been meticulously coding it to navigate a challenging underwater-themed course.
Gilbert will face a variety of tasks, including:
- Securing and transporting coral structures
- Releasing a tagged shark back into its habitat
- Guiding an angler fish to its home within a shipwreck
- Raising the mast of a sunken shipwreck
- Retrieving a treasure chest from the shipwreck
- Creating safe habitats for sea creatures
- Releasing a creature attached to an AUV
- Exploring difficult-to-reach waters with a submersible
- Using sonar technology to scan for objects and animals
- Collecting krill to feed a whale
- Adjusting a cargo ship's route to avoid whale migration routes
- Collecting samples and artefacts for scientific analysis
- Docking a ship carrying collected samples and artifacts2345
The team must strategically choose which tasks Gilbert will complete within an allotted two-and-a-half-minute timeframe.
Pupil Hayden, from Year 9, said: "It is definitely a challenge but when we all work as a team, we've been able to pull through"
Matthew, from Year 9, said: "It is a cool experience and I'm having lots of fun"
Dawood, also from Year 9, said: "We're having fun whilst working hard"
Hannah Keogh, Science Teacher and Robotics Project Leader, Abbey Park School, said: “I'm very proud of all the amazing ideas that the team of students have come up with.
"Their robotic designs are innovative, creative and all down to the hard work and dedication the team has shown. The First Lego League Challenge emphasises core values such as discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork, and, of course, fun.
"We’re really looking forward to competing in Bristol next February.”
Your Comments
Be the first to comment on this article
Login or Register to post a comment on this article