On 14^th March students from the University of Birmingham IEEE Student Branch helped out building the Lego trophies and models for the FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge! The Lego League Challenge is a global robotics-based competition for 9-16yr olds and helps to develop problem-solving, teamwork and STEM skills using Lego. The regional tournament happened on 28th March here at the University of Birmingham.

The Lego Trophy as a prize

The theme for this year was renewable energy and so a wind turbine model needed to be made out of Lego. The robot the teams would design, would be coded to operate the different stations, such as in this case spinning the wind turbine by pressing the red button.

Or doing a high five with this hand

Here are some more pictures of our student body who kindly helped out.

Due to the event being for school children we did not take photos of the event on the 28^th March but our Treasurer and Social media manager volunteered in helping throughout the day of the event showing people around and answering any queries.

The day was really fun and competitive with schools and community groups bringing in robots they had programmed either after school or at lunchtime clubs. They also had to show their presenting skills by presenting the design of their robot to a panel of judges.

The main event was a points-based game seeing how many of the tasks they could complete within a set time with the robots they had designed. Overall, it was fun day with some talks given by lecturers in the university to encourage students to pursue STEM subjects.

By David Li

Treasurer & Publicity Officer, UoB IEEE Student Branch