Lego team wins a place in national finals

Ten Year 5 and 6 pupils from St Anne's Fulshaw CE Primary School took part in the regional First Lego League UK competition at Daresbury Laboratory on Wednesday, 5th December.

The theme of this year's competition is 'Into Orbit', and focuses on the challenges of long distance space travel.

The competition requires teams of up to ten children, between 9 and 16 years old, to design and build a Lego Mindstorms robot to complete a series of challenges in two and a half minutes. Each team also has to research a problem connected with living and working in space, and present their solution to a panel of judges in a five minute group presentation. Additionally, there is also a robot design interview and a team challenge.

'St Anne's Space Agency' had a very successful day, beating two high schools, two grammar schools and two primary school teams from the north west, winning both the robot game competition and the overall prize, for the second time in three years.

Mrs Penny Thomas, Deputy Headteacher at the school and Lego Club leader said, "I am so proud of the hard work, enthusiasm and new skills the children have developed this year. They have committed to spending two hours after school twice a week for the past half term, working very hard and effectively on all the aspects of the competition. They have spoken to scientists from the European Space Agency, made prototypes, designed and rebuilt their robot a number of times, all without losing patience or enthusiasm.

"We love to find every opportunity for our pupils to experience the broadest possible curriculum as they progress through our school. The engineering, problem solving, designing, making, coding and programming skills that children require to compete at this level are highly sophisticated, particularly as we are competing successfully against teams from secondary schools. We are very proud that our curriculum enables our children to develop all of these skills, as they can be applied across so many other areas of learning and life too. We are thrilled to be returning to the First Lego League UK and Ireland National Finals on Saturday 16th February 2019."