Lego League, Didcot - January 2020

Teams of young people take part in Lego League to encourage an interest in real-world themes and to develop key skills that are crucial for their future careers.  This year we entered two teams, Supernova and Phoenix, to compete against other schools at Didcot and Legoland Windsor.

On the tournament day, teams had three attempts at the robot games, where an autonomous robot tries to score as many points as possible in 2 ½ minutes.  The robot is also judged on its programming and engineering development.    Teams also delivered a five-minute presentation to judges, when they demonstrated how they had identified, designed and shared across their project.  Finally, teams explained how they had demonstrated Lego’s core values.  

Dom and James took part in this for the last time this month and have written this account:

After arriving at Didcot, we were invited to our technical, which is a presentation to a panel of judges on how we innovated and solved problems. We feel this went well as we had prepared some documents and had commented on our code. The next thing was the first of three attempts in the robot game. This helped us calibrate the robot and, after some helpful advice from our judge, we were ready for a big score in the next round.  For the next part of the day we had a presentation, showing off our project idea.  This was where we had to come up with an area in our local community and find ways to develop and improve it.  We decided to make plans around The Makery, once located in Fleet Library.

After lunch, we moved to our second attempt at the robot game. This was our best attempt, which put us in a strong position on the leaderboard.  Later on we had our final presentation of the day. This was on how well we worked as a team - dubbed ‘core values’.  Finally, the awards presentation and, for the first time ever, we had won the robot game, arguably the most prestigious individual award at the regional level.  What a day!

We are pleased with the progress we have made since previous years of the competition and we wish all Calthorpe teams good luck in future years.