Lego gets serious

SIS has joined the Scandinavian Lego League Challenge. The 2022 Challenge theme is ‘Superpowered’ and is about energy and the global energy crisis. 

The Challenge set for this year’s participants is to build and programme a robot to complete a series of tasks on a common challenge arena board that all teams will use. The robot must complete tasks at each of 14 stations on the board but – and here’s the challenge – it is not possible to complete all the tasks in the allotted time, the tasks have different reward values, and the tasks require the robot to use different tools which can only be changed in a designated area of the board.  

The students must devise the optimum strategy for scoring points, by exploring the benefit of completing few high-value stations, or more low value ones, and other strategic trade-offs.

The team also undertakes a research project to identify real-world problems that are relevant to their age. Teams of students then engage in research, problem-solving, coding, and engineering – building and programming their LEGO robot .

The SIS team – comprising 12 students from Grades 5–9 – is already hard at work in after school sessions every Friday, and they are making steady progress. Already they have declared the ambition to be global champions, but there is the small matter of the local competition first.

Beatrice from Grade 6 explained to The Dispatch ‘I’ve enjoyed working with my teammates from the different grades. There is a lot to do, but I like to think we could win the first stage, and maybe win in the Scandinavian round in Oslo. After that, who knows, maybe we could win the World title.’

We’ll keep you posted on the SIS team’s progress in the competition in future issues.