Knockholt Stingers, the team from St. Katherine's C of E Primary School, beat sixteen teams from schools across Kent and Medway to become the overall winners of this year's FIRST LEGO^® League (FLL) Regional Final. They fought off stiff competition and performed well across all seven categories to win their trophy, a winners cup made entirely from LEGO^®.

The FLL is an annual event which engages school children in science through themed activities including a robot challenge and practical project work. It requires teams to work on challenges over the autumn term and culminates in a Regional Final event which was hosted, for the seventh consecutive year, by the University of Kent at their Canterbury campus on Tuesday 24th November. 140 pupils aged between 9 and 16 took part and, together with their supporters, created a fantastic atmosphere.

The winning team will go forward to the UK final at Loughborough on 23 January 2010.

This year's competition theme, smart moves, focussed on transportation. Teams were asked to consider transport in their local area and to identify ways in which it was underperforming by considering issues such as safety, efficiency and energy consumption. They were then asked to devise solutions to solve these problems, and to present their findings in a creative way to a panel of judges at the Regional Final.

The smart moves robot challenge required the teams to program a sensor equipped vehicle (a robot built using a LEGO^® Mindstorm programmable controller) to perform a set of tasks in a test environment. These tasks corresponded to transportation activities such as gaining access to places, avoiding impacts and traffic jams, and keeping passengers safe.

All participating teams said how much they had enjoyed this year's challenge and all were awarded medals and certificates at the end of the day. The cups were awarded to the winners of the seven categories by the Mayor of Canterbury - Dr Harry Cragg, Professor Simon Thompson, and other personnel from the University of Kent including one disguised as Mr. LEGO^®.

This year's Kent and Medway regional final was organised by the University of Kent's Partnership Development Office and the School of Computing in conjunction with Medway Business Partnership. It was supported by the British Computer Society.

Planning for next year's FLL 2010 competition is already underway when the theme will be 'Engineering Meets Medicine'. Teams will explore the cutting-edge world of Biomedical Engineering to discover innovative ways to repair injuries, overcome genetic predispositions, and maximize the body's potential, with the intended purpose of leading happier and healthier lives.

Seventeen schools participated in the competition. They were:

Published 26 November 2009
Contact: M.L.Bowman@kent.ac.uk