FIRST LEGO League Regional Champions
Posted On: 01/02/18
An amazing day of competition proved that perseverance pays off! On Tuesday 16th January, two teams of ten CRGS students travelled to Cambridge University’s Engineering Department for the FIRST LEGO League regional final. This global robotics-based life skills competition challenges students to design, build and programme a robot to autonomously compete in missions. Team Aquarius and Team Neptune pitched their robot designs against other schools from across the region.
Team Neptune (James Richardson, Joseph Mayhew-Millard, Jacob Hicks, Karthik Movva, Arnav Das, Archie Roch, James Stobart, Venuja Gunaratna and Tejas Bantupalli) had the steepest learning curve on the day, having never competed before. Much to the team’s delight, their robot performed well, which encouraged them to regroup, develop their programmes and return to the table later in round two.
The robot created by Team Aquarius (Jensen Hoy, Stephen Huang, Blake Tudor, Zachary Cliff, Hemanth Ramkumar, Aaron Cox, Harvey Elson, Frederick Klingsick, Hugh Anstee and Todd Cox) turned out to be very reliable. The boys got a great score and were soon at the top of the leader board. As the day unfolded, it became clear that the other features of the competition such as the Core Values teamwork and the boys’ project presentation would become decisive for the outcome of the regional final.
With the second and final round of the competition complete, Team Aquarius were still top on the scoreboard. All the teams congregated in the university's main auditorium to listen to Andrew Smyth (aerospace engineer at Rolls-Royce and Great British Bake off finalist 2016) announce the winners. The winners of Core Values – recognising outstanding teamwork – went to Team Neptune, and the overall winners of the FIRST LEGO League regional final went to Team Aquarius!
The judges were very impressed with the team’s amazing robot design and project idea for recycling rainwater to minimise waste. The ten boys are now deep in preparation for the UK and Ireland final, which will be held at Bristol University later in February. We wish them every success.
