FIRST LEGO League - Challenge

The Programme

FIRST LEGO League shows young people what it means to be an engineer and work with STEM skills and subjects, but focuses on practical, hand-on learning, so they are doing, not watching. FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge is designed for 9-16 year-olds and develops key skills that are crucial for their future careers. Young people work together to explore a given topic and to design, build and program an autonomous LEGO® robot to solve a series of missions.

Robot Game - Teams build a robot using a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® or SPIKE™ Prime kit that they program to autonomously complete a series of missions on a specialised field to score as many points as possible. Innovation Project - Teams must research the annual theme as detailed in the Challenge Document. After exploring different ideas, they will identify one problem related to the theme, design a solution to solve it, and develop a presentation to communicate that solution. Robot Design - Teams must explain the process of designing, building and programming their LEGO® robot they are using with the Robot Game. Core Values - Teams are working together constantly to solve problems and create solutions.

The six Core Values that run through each programme are Discovery, Innovation, Inclusion, Impact, Teamwork and Fun. These Core Values are integral to the programme, and whilst they are working towards an end goal and have many objectives - developing these skills is the most important part of the programme. The programme gives all children in a team equal opportunity and each team member must contribute in order for the team to be successful.

What you can do

Teachers and coaches are fully supported with comprehensive resources available to download on the IET Teacher Resources webpage, training videos, digital assets and support.

You can [sign up here] (https://www.changex.org/ie/First-lego-league-challenge/start), complete the 30 Day Challenge to get grant funding to cover all the costs associated with delivering the programme in your school or community group and the team at the IET will support you through the process.