We are a group of Year 6 students from Penpol School in Cornwall, UK who are taking part in the FIRST LEGO League for the second and final time. As Year 6’s we’ll soon be leaving Penpol and going our separate ways to Secondary School.
Our journey started with spending our lunchtimes in the Mac Suite, working hard on designing our robot, researching food waste and recycling across the county for our project and developing our ideas to present our findings. Today we’re thrilled to discover that all our hard work has paid off and that we’ve been invited to Massachusetts, USA to represent Great Britain in an International Competition!
Our teacher, Mr Woolcock, asked us to read some lines for a video – but we didn’t realise what we’d be saying until they came up on the screen. These are our genuine reactions to discovering that we’ve been invited to America!
This website will tell you all about our journey so far, as well as sharing some way that you can help support us as we travel across the Atlantic to take our message of recycling Food Waste to America!
Two years ago we started out as two separate teams, the Creative Coders and the LEGO Leaders. That year we took part in the Cargo Connect season challenge where we competed virtually in our Regional Competition and then attended the National Final in Harrogate. That experience galvanised our passion for FIRST LEGO League and from the moment we got back to school we were already thinking about taking part again next year!
When September came around and the new season, Superpowered, was announced we knew we had to combine forces into one super-team and try to get back to the National Final again. The Penpol Pumpkins were born. We won the Champions Award at our Regional Final and before we knew it we were back in Harrogate. Incredibly though, our journey hasn’t ended yet! We came first in the Innovation Project (in the whole country!) and then finished in second place overall. This means we get to fulfill our wildest dream – actually going to an international event with our team.
Yeah, we get this a lot! Our (now award winning) Innovation Project was inspired by the amount of pumpkins that are left to go to waste after Halloween each year. This got us thinking about Food Waste in general and how bad it was that 35% of bin bags in Cornwall contained food waste.
Did you know that when food decomposes in landfill it released tons of Methane gas into the atmosphere? That greenhouse gas is 25x worse than Carbon Dioxide. It doesn’t have to be like this though, that same Methane can be harnessed and used as a clean, renewable energy just by recycling our old food waste!
Anyway, you don’t want to read tons of writing when you can just watch our presentation, right? Look – it’s just there ➡️
You’re right! We’ve designed, built and adapted a robot made out of LEGO to take part in a series of challenges on a large game board. Not only that, we’ve written complex code to ensure the missions are completely successfully without having to interrupt the robot while it’s moving!
This requires a huge amount of problem solving and logical thinking – as well as figuring out some clever tricks to try and score more points on the board! Our highest score we’ve managed to get in school is 295 out of 410, but we haven’t quite been able to replicate that at a competition event yet. We’re practicing hard and hope to reach that goal when we get to America!
Our story has been shared quite a lot in the past few days, with the whole community rallying around us and offering support. You can explore some of our recent media appearances here:
Basically, we need money. Lots of money.
Getting to America is going to be a very expensive trip and as a school it isn’t something we can do by ourselves. We don’t have a final price yet, but our teacher Mr Woolcock thinks it could be around the £25,000 mark to get all ten of us and our teachers to the competition and back – which would include flights, travel to and from airports, hotels, competition entry fees, food etc.
In order to raise the funds we need there are three different options and even if you aren’t able to support us financially, we hope you’ll be able to support us by sharing our story with others.
last updated on
Wednesday 24th May
Why yes, we’re glad you asked!
Cornwall Council have kindly written a press release for us, which you can download below. There are also a bunch of photos of us at both the Regional and National finals that you can use with the story (and don’t worry, we’ve got parental permission for these images to be used to promote our team!).
Finally, if you want to speak to us properly please do email our teacher Mr Woolcock and he can sort that out. Interviews, quotes, soundbites – anything we can do to help spread our message and raise some money to get us to America.
Thank you for helping share our story! 🎃