Students from two Sunbury schools travelled to Sydney to compete in a national LEGO robotics competition.
The first LEGO League and its open championships aim to promote science, technology, engineering and math skills among students through programming and operating LEGO robots to complete challenges.
The national championship south competition was hosted at Macquarie University in Sydney on Saturday, November 30.
A team of 10 year seven students from Sunbury Downs College were one of the local teams to advance to this round after the qualifying round, also winning an award and scored highly across all four judging areas.
Sunbury Downs College maths and numeracy learning specialist Lauren Jackson said she felt “very proud” of the students’ achievements.
“Being involved in this competition has developed their problem solving skills, teamwork, coding, research, sportsmanship and public speaking skills,” Ms Jackson said.
Sunbury Downs year 7 student Zoe said her favourite part of the competition was meeting new people and year 7 student Logan said he enjoyed being able to “collaborate with everyone.“
A group of Sunbury Primary School students from grades five and six also advanced to the national round, which the school’s STEAM teacher Olivia Graham said involved “so much effort.”
The students also had to come up with a solution to fix a problem within the ocean, coming up with an app that aims to raise awareness and promote action for coral conservation.
“It’s such a unique program. It’s something that people probably wouldn’t have a clue about unless they were involved in it … it’s a pretty huge effort for them to get to this stage,” Ms Graham said.
The successful teams in the national championship rounds advance to the global competition round.
Oscar Parry
