FIRST LEGO LEAGUE - Climate Connection

Team Bjarkøy entering the stage. Veronica is carrying Tea on her back. The principal right behind them. Lego is a Danish company and the first Legoland built is in Billund, Denmark. First Lego League is an American invention. It has children from 6 years of age building with legos and incorporating it with a robot that they program to do certain challenges. Every year there is a new theme for the competition. This year the theme is 'Climate Connection'. The children get together and compete who can do the challenges most precise and fastest. Teams from all over the world get the same challenge. It starts with local competitions, then national and finally world championship.

The children made great signs for the tournament.

Veronica is excited to get started!

Here are the tables they compete on. The tables look the same all over the world. Two teams will compete on one table at the same time with a speaker commenting what is going on. At the same time, the audience can see what is going on on a big screen. The kids get very nervous, but it is a good challenge for them. 

We had a great cheering section with parents, siblings and Vikings all over the place. This is my neighbor, Veronica. She has a son in 5th grade, Gabriel.

Barbara was helping in the cheering section, too.

Here are two of Team Bjarkøy's robot drivers; Rebecca and Axel. They did a fabulous job with all that pressure on them.

Driving the robots is one part of the competition. There are two more challenges. This year the children had to find connections in our community with the challenges we face with the climate. Team Bjarkøy talked about two different kinds of birds that we see lots of today that we never saw a few decades ago and how much natural gas ferries would save the environment around here. They had to interview people, send e-mail and put it all together in a presentation. Team Bjarkøy did a great job on this. The third part of the competition is a Show. Our team unfortunately didn't have time to put this together. Of 20 teams, Team Bjarkøy ended up on 5th place after robot driving and total 7th place all together. They did a great job. The winning team had hired a professional engineer to help them out with the robot part, so there was no way we could compete with them. They were almost 150 points ahead of team number two. Most of the teams in Norway get to do this in school hours. Our kids spent many hours every day at school putting this together. Quite the advantage in comparison to the Noddin (our home Elementary School) Team where the kids have to meet after school and practice.

The town council gave money for a stay in a hotel for the kids and teachers. They had to go to the city the night before the competition to make it in time the next morning.