Over the weekend 9 students from KNS (Zoe Sole, Dayna Bennett, Abbie McCurrie, Jazmin Piper, Thomas Brocherie, Joshua Metzger, Zander Moffat, Sam King and Zach Moore) attended the First Lego League National Championships in Auckland.

The team have spent the last 5 months coming up with a construction based problem to a local issue, had their ideas tested by industry professionals and created a presentation, speech and mock designs to show the judges. They also needed to create presentations for the robot and the Lego Core Values. Last year there were only 23 teams at the event and in 2019 there were closer to 50. Our robot team coded a Lego EV3 Robot to complete challenges on the board. They also had to design a robot that had the ability to complete multiple challenges that involved pushing, pulling and carrying objects.

After two days of presentations and some fierce competition on the robot board KNS came away with the Judges award for best overall presentation team, Mr Johnson won the coaches award for best coaching of the tournament and KNS finished 3rd. This has qualified them to represent New Zealand in the Asia Pacific Championships in Sydney Australia in 2020. The Team would like to thank its sponsors Brain Institute New Zealand, Pegasus Bay Auto Kaiapoi and Paladin Sports New Zealand, without their support the team would not have made it to Auckland to compete. If anyone knows someone who has construction industry contacts that may be interested in sponsoring the KNS FLL team, please contact Mr J.