Tonight the Pumpkins featured on ITV Westcountry news in a segment where they talk about the FIRST LEGO League as well as sharing how excited they are to be heading to Boston.

“There’s so much problem solving, creative thinking and fun involved. There’s trial and error, crashing into things, things falling off the table, robots smashing on the floor.  But at the end of it, you get this creation which they can then run around the board with and earn all these points because they put that work in. And it’s really rewarding to see that come to life because they’ve created that and made it happen.” – Jacob Woolcock

There’s a lovely write-up on the ITV website too – find it here.

We’ve heard from other teams who have been in International Finals that it’s quite common to bring a sweet treat from your country to share with all the other teams.  We really hope this is true (who wouldn’t want to try 80 different sweets?!) so the Pumpkins got to thinking about what a typical British sweet might be.

After some thought, they settled on the idea of pieces of Rock.  A lightbulb went off and we realised that perhaps we could even get our own, personal, rock made!  A few emails later and thanks to the incredibly kind Sue at Promotional Candy, the Pumpkins had commissioned their very own Union Jack coloured sweets!

Don’t they look absolutely awesome? And so cool to see them being made too.

The Pumpkins shared their Innovation Project presentation in front of 60 business owners at the Software Cornwall Tech Connect event in the Cornwall Council Chambers at New County Hall, Truro.  They stayed afterwards to get stuck into some coding at the Tech Jam where they explored Python and writing instructions to control LED lights and a rover robot.

Today in school we had ‘Dress Like a Pumpkin’ day where everyone was encouraged to come in wearing orange if they could.  As well as this we had a ‘Name the Penguin’ competition and a really exciting LEGO Sale as well (thanks to James B’s dad!) which helped us raise lots of money towards our trip.

Today we had the pleasure of being joined by CEO Steve Jermy and some of his team from Celtic Sea Power, who are kindly sponsoring us in our bid to get to America. We learnt all about their plans to launch floating wind turbines the size of the Eiffel Tower into the ocean and in return we shared our presentations and Robot Games run through with them. Thank you so much for the support Celtic Sea Power, we’re incredibly grateful.

James S, Ernie and Piran went up to the Pirate FM Studios this morning to speak to Neil and Saffy LIVE on air! They shared how excited they were about going to America and how it felt when they first learnt that they’d been invited to represent Great Britain. Not only that, but Saffy challenged them to a LEGO building challenge against Neil which proved to be a lot of fun!

Listen to our chat with Neil and Saffy:

And find out how we got on with the building challenge!