Four hundred and fifty primary school pupils packed the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) Culdrose base at Helston. In turn, they got truly excited to engage in the Lego League Regional Final. This year’s competition and theme, titled “World Class,” encouraged students’ teams to use Lego robots they built themselves to accomplish multiple high-tech missions on a complex game table. The event was all about archaeology. Students developed skills in creative problem-solving and acquired first-hand experience of the engineering process.
Students from each participating school around the region demonstrated their engineering principles, competitive teamwork, and coding capabilities on the battle field. Felicity Blight, the school secretary at Porthleven School, spoke about the academic return of the effort. She said that the program really boosts their STEM education. Through intensive coding sticks and stones, the next year go-to entrepreneur and collaboration with their cohort-mates. This increased emphasis on STEM education hopes to ignite a new firestorm of engineers and scientists in the making.
The whole atmosphere was electric, as students raced their robots with excitement through various obstacle courses. Among the participants was Elowyn, shown here, who told us she was having an amazing time at the event. “It’s a great experience for kids our age because you’re learning and still having fun,” she said.
George Thorpe, a competitor from the South West, commented on the grit and determination shown by all of the young competitors. “The robots are not perfect; they will go wrong and they do go wrong, but the children get through that and persevere,” he remarked. This grit is a feature, not a bug, of education in highly competitive environments like these.
The experience provided an opportunity for development of technical skills, but even more so – collaboration among the students. Students worked together all day long to identify problems with their designs and make changes to their robots to refine their designs. Their collaborative approach really emphasized the value of strong communication.
As the competition wrapped up, participants walked away with heads held high and excitement for STEM fields. Their experiences at RNAS Culdrose provided a unique opportunity to bridge classroom learning with real-world applications in engineering and technology.
