STUDENTS at Callington Community College were celebrating after winning a regional robotics final.

The regional final of the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) UK Challenge, which is sponsored by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), was held at Callington Community College last month.

Mr Watts, mathematics teacher and robotics co-ordinator at the college, oversaw the final with a team of Plymouth University robotics students judging the individual disciplines and Dr Nicolas Outram, lecturer at the University of Plymouth, on-hand to give advice throughout the day.

The team from Callington were overall winners of the regional final and will be going to Loughborough University in February to represent the South West in the UK finals. The team of Sam Lane (Y11), Paul Thomas (Y11), Harry Warren (Y10) and Joe Lane (Y8) competed over four areas of robotics: robotic performance; robot design; how robots can help with recycling; and core values.

This year’s competition was called Trash Trek and its theme was recycling. Teams had to design, build and program a robot to complete different tasks involving all aspects of recycling. From com-posting to the demolition of models and sorting of the waste.

The competition took a whole day, with ten teams from eight South West schools taking part, and was judged by students from the University of Plymouth’s programming course.

Despite quite a tight competition the team from Callington won two out of the four disciplines — robot design and core values as well as the overall title.

FIRST LEGO League is a global science and technology challenge for teams of students, to encourage an interest in real world issues and develop key skills that are crucial for their future careers. The students work together to explore a given topic and to design, build and programme an autonomous LEGO robot to solve a series of missions. FLL is for young people aged 9 to16 years, working in teams of up to ten students with a supporting adult coach.

Each year FLL releases a new challenge for the teams. The challenge involves a robot game and a research project and students need to demonstrate the FLL core values throughout all their work.