FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is a competition catering for upper-primary and lower-secondary school students. Every year, teams of up to 10 students build, program and compete with a robot, while also learning about a modern problem in science and engineering and developing solutions for it.

Team SHuFLLe entered two teams in the regional competition. The juniors took out Best Robot Design and the seniors claimed the title of Tournament Champions.

The competition was created to encourage children to explore the world of engineering and science, FIRST teamed up with Lego to get kids involved. 

“It’s great for the kids because it’s not just about playing with Lego and programming, two things which are really cool, but it also makes them stop and think about an actual real world problem and their solution,” coach Ian Woods said.​

“Their solution doesn’t have to be a full blown working model, but they need to show they have researched it and come up with it.” 

Team SHuFFLe was established three years ago.

“We were approached by another team who kept winning their regional competition, going through to nationals, cruising through nationals then going over to the international competition and getting completely wiped out because the international standard was that much higher than the Australian standard,” Mr Woods said.

“They’ve been really pushing to get more Australian teams happening to lift the level of competition.”

Although the team didn’t win at their first attempt, they enjoyed it enough to keep going and meet each week at the Woods’ home to train and work on their projects.

“We ended up with one team of ten kids the first year, we did okay, we didn’t place but we were high enough up that we walked away feeling very happy about it,” Mr Woods said. 

“In our second year we created two teams which was twice as hard, twice as chaotic and twice as many kids.”

Each year FFL release a new theme for the international competition and teams complete a project which addresses a real world problem.

“This year was Animal Allies, the idea of the project is based on the theme the kids have to analyse some sort of problem in the world, in this case the relationship between animals and humans and see if they can come up with an innovative solution to improve or make a positive relationship between them,” Mr Woods said.

“The themes can be very broad ranging and are totally open ended. There are no guidelines other than where to start your research and they’re encouraged to talk to experts in the field to sound out how their idea might work.” 

As well as their robot, teams are also critiqued on what the competition calls ‘Core Values’.

“They’ve got these nice set of core values, one of them is the gracious professionalism, the other is ‘Coopetition’,” Mr Woods said.

“The idea is you are trying to get the best you possible can out of your robot but you’re also expected to help other teams get the best out of theirs as well.”

The competition also nurtures the children’s development and maturity.

“It is well known throughout the world that 60 per cent of the time your robot is going to do what it is supposed to do, ultimately it is only a toy, that means 40 per cent of the time it doesn’t,” Mr Woods said. 

“It works a number of times then it doesn’t, we are constantly trying to build up resilience in the kids and that’s really hard for the kids to have that level of resilience and understand it’s nothing they have done or they haven’t failed.”