Edinburgh pupils reach UK finals of global Lego competition with ‘cutting edge’ idea
Edinburgh primary pupils will represent the capital at the FIRST Lego League Challenge next month - a global STEM competition that teaches children coding, engineering, and research skills.
The group of P7 pupils at Towerbank Primary, who became regional champions in February, impressed judges with their problem solving skills and ‘cutting edge’ ideas, and will now travel south of the border in May to compete against children as old as 16 in the UK finals.
Alasdair Friend, Towerbank Primary’s headteacher who supervises the group, said the 11 and 12-year-old pupils have done really well over the last six months and learned “engineering and coding solutions that are well above national expectations”.
The annual challenge is a partnership between FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) and the LEGO Group, and has two main areas: a robotics part where pupils work together to design, build, and program an autonomous Lego robot, and an innovation project where pupils must find a solution for a real world problem.
Mr Friend said: “This year’s theme, Unearthed, is an archaeological theme and all the tasks that they have to solve are loosely themed around archaeology. So all the robot missions involve archaeological exploration - digging things up, revealing things, things like that.
“The problem the group identified for their research project was that most archaeological sites are underneath buildings or the sites have been built over and it's very difficult for archaeologists find.
“The solution that they've come up was to use AI to compare aerial photos to spot things that have potentially been covered up by buildings. And they've spoken to real archaeologists about their topic who say it's a genuinely interesting and exciting idea. So I think that’s partly why they've done so well is because their idea is really quite cutting edge.”
Mr Friend first introduced the project to pupils when he joined the school nine years ago, and in that time the school has won dozens of trophies at the competition over the years.
He said: “It’s an international competition that’s been going for around 20 years and it's a really exciting project where children learn sophisticated engineering and coding skills and how to solve problems as part of a team. Primary schools do enter the challenge but in the majority of cases it’s teams from high schools taking part.
Mr Friend added: This group have done really well and learned engineering and coding solutions that are well above the national expectations.”