By Tara Mutaditch, Year 8

The question I’m often asked is “What do you do at LEGO club?” with most people believing that we spend all day building LEGO, whereas in fact the true purpose of LEGO club is actually very serious.

 In LEGO Club you compete in the first LEGO League – a worldwide competition which consists of three different levels: Regional, National and International. Regionals are when you compete with other schools in your county or province, Nationals are when you take on the winners from all the other counties/provinces to represent your country and finally, Internationals are when you compete with all other representatives of countries from all over the world.

The LEGO League competition also consists of these four sections: Core Values, Robotics, Product Design and Safety. All teams have to do a presentation on the core values, which is considered to be the most important part as these are used in everyday life.

In the Robotics section, you are given a map where there are many missions to complete with your robot, which you build yourself. You are allowed to include as many attachments as you want on the robot. Teams have to explain to the judges how their robot works and also all the different attachments they have on their robot. You program your robot to tackle the missions on the maps to try to get as many points as possible.

Product design is when you have to create a product that is used and based on the theme of your first LEGO League competition.

As our ‘Electri-city ‘ team won Regionals of the LEGO League on December 7th, we will be taking part in Nationals on February 22nd in Bristol.

When we participated in Regionals, our team made up of Year 7-10s came second in Robotics and we also came first in Core Values but our Product Design needed a little bit of work after the first competition. However, we have been working hard on this to improve it because we want to win at Nationals!