Harton Primary Puzzlers in the Gazette

1st April 2020L Forster

To celebrate the work the Harton Primary Puzzlers put into their First Lego League project, the local Newspaper the Shields Gazette wrote an article about them.

Read about our success at the Regional competition below.

School children to compete in national Lego League competition with design of solar-powered tram for King Street

A team of primary school children from South Shields will put their skills to the test in the final of the national Lego League competition this weekend.

By Sarah Sinclair
Friday, 21st February 2020, 11:45 am
Updated
Harton Primary School pupils with their design.

Pupils from Years 5 and 6 at Harton Primary School won the First Lego League competition at a regional tournament held at The Word in South Shields in December 2019.

Now Caitlin Kerr, Chloe Hill, Ruby Bird and Evie Wardale, Daniel Allen, Electra Myers, Daniel Jack and Sophie Mustafa – aka the Harton Primary Puzzlers – will travel to Bristol to represent the region in the finals.

The competition will take place at the University of West England (UWE) on Saturday, February 22 with the Puzzlers going up against more than 70 teams from around the country.

The Harton Primary Puzzlers are through to the national Lego League competition

This will be the second time the Year 6 students have made it this far, after successfully reaching the finals last year – but a first for Caitlin, Chloe, Ruby and Evie.

The international Lego League competition sees students research real-world problems such as food safety, recycling or energy. They then design and build a robot, using Lego Mindstorms technology, and compete on a table-top playing field.

The team took their inspiration from some of the issues facing their hometown for this year’s theme ‘city shapers’.

They designed an eco-friendly, solar-powered tram to travel down King Street and help tackle traffic congestion in the area.

The children reached out to a range of experts for advice and support, including Nexus, the solar panel company PowerRoll and South Tyneside Council.

They will now present their idea to a panel of judges at the finals, as well as completing other Lego tasks on the day.

Team coach and Year 5 teacher Lee Forster commented: “The children have worked really hard all year- giving up many of their playtimes to practise both the robot game and the presentation. It’s been great to see them so motivated and working together.”

Harton Primary headteacher, Karen Ratcliffe added: “This competition has given our pupils the opportunity to think like engineers and scientists and I am extremely proud of their achievements in winning the overall competition.”

https://www.shieldsgazette.com/education/school-children-compete-national-lego-league-competition-design-solar-powered-tram-king-street-1886216

Junior Lego League!

17th March 2020C Whitehead

Junior Lego League have been thinking about different buildings and architecture around South Shields. We discussed the different features of buildings and chose some buildings that we liked . We sketched out the building and discussed the structure. We then used Lego to start to build our chosen building!

Harton Primary Puzzlers – First Lego League England and Wales Final in Bristol

26th February 2020L Forster

In the middle of our half term, the Harton Primary Puzzlers met at Newcastle Airport – excited for their trip to Bristol for the First Lego League England and Wales Final.

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On Saturday the 22nd of February, we set off the University of West England to the competition, setting up our information board at table 50 in the pit.

After the opening ceremony, we had to quickly change into our costumes to give deliver the best and last presentation on our idea for a solar powered tram to help boost interest in South Shields town centre. After than we had to run to the Robot Game table for our first of three attempts to score as many points as possible. Lets watch:

The day was full of interesting activities, on top of the usual Core Values, Robot Design discussion and practice tables for the robot game. The teams spoke to other teams, interviewed by the IET team and, of course, had lunch.

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With all our practices over, our last robot game was on table 1, with all the cameras on us. Below is the live stream of our last game (If time link doesn’t work, time is 4:42:20):

On the final tables we came 20th, out of 66 teams. But with teams with joint scores, we had the 13th highest score on the day! The Harton Primary Puzzlers worked their socks off, did themselves (and their teachers) proud, and had a great day!

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Lego League Regional Competition – 5th December 2019

10th December 2019L Forster

After months of hard work, the Harton Primary Puzzlers took part in the South Tyneside First Lego League competition – with OpenZone in The Word.

This year’s task was to identify a problem in our local area and design a solution to fix it. We designed at solar powered tram that would travel from the The Word down King Street to the sea front. We thought this idea would:

  • Make the sea front more accessible to people who could not walk that distance.
  • Bring in more people to the town – bringing shops back to the town centre.
  • Lower pollution from less cars being used in the town.

We presented this idea as a new report, with Caitlin and Sophie as hosts and Ruby as the weather girl, and the rest of the Puzzlers being all the experts we spoke to – including a solar panel scientist; a tram engineer from Beamish; a PhD student from Northumbria University; a Nexus worker; and a member of the South Tyneside 365 rejuvenation scheme.

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The Puzzlers spend the day talking to other teams, finding out about their ideas, helping with robot tasks, practicing their robot challenge and just having a great time!

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They also had to compete in a robot game; a 2 and half minute challenge to complete as many tasks as possible to score the most points, with 4 highest scoring teams got into the Semi-finals.

The Puzzlers came 3rd in the knock-outs with 215 points. When competing in the Semi finals, they scored 225 – securing their spot in 2nd to progress to the finals. Competing against Oakwood, who were unbelievably talented at the robot game. They set a heavy lead with 300 points in their first of 3 rounds – securing their trophy in the robot game – but the Puzzlers fought in every round, scoring their highest score of the day of 245 points.

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The trophy ceremony gave the Puzzlers 2 reasons to celebrate! Their robot – Athena, God of Technology – won ‘Best Robot Design’, after being referred to as ‘a beast’ by the judges. After coming 2nd in both the presentation and robot game, and 1st in the robot desgin, the Puzzlers won the overall day – for a 2nd year running – and now have to compete in Bristol in the national competition!

Harton Puzzlers Fund Raising

By L Forster15th January 2019

The Puzzlers are raising money for their trip to the national Lego League competition. They have designed 8 different badges and are planning on selling them for 50p each, to go towards the flights and hotel for the event.

So the children have started cutting and pressing their badges on a lunchtime. Only about 500 left to go!

Lego League Regionals 2018

By L Forster11th December 2018

After 3 months of hard work, and (for some) EVERY lunchtime since September, the day finally arrived on December 6th.

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Kitted in their lab coats, glasses and bow ties, the Harton Puzzlers travelled to The Word to compete against teams from all over the region – including secondary schools! The first few rounds with the robot were disappointing, as we didn’t score as highly as we would have liked. After their first robot game, the pupils scored technical points, which involved talking about their robot design and strategy. This usually take about 5 minutes, but the boys talked for 10 minutes!

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Next the children had 5 minutes for a costume change and got ready for their presentation. After many practises at school, they delivered it perfectly! It was clear, loud and confident. The presentation even included a “live” video call from an astronaut on the International Space Station.

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There was a teamwork task, where the children had to work together effectively in order to complete a Lego building challenge. After lunch, we found out we were in the semi final!

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The Puzzlers got through to the semi finals- joint 3rd with St. Gregory’s. They had 2 more chances to prove their robot’s skills. In their second and final attempt, the boys protested to the judges over a ruling – supported by teachers from different schools – and the Puzzlers scraped into the finals with 72 points.

In the finals, the Puzzlers competed against Oakwood Comprehensive School – who kindly offered up their extra attachments, which allowed the Harton to scorecard more points. After three more rounds of the robot game,  the Puzzlers’ score got higher and higher with each attempt.  The trophy for Robot Table Champion went to the well deserved Oakwood!

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Every team was awarded at least one trophy, for skills such as teamwork, presentation, tactics and co-operation, but the Harton Puzzlers were delighted to find out that they had won the overall competition! After so much work from our team, there were many tears of happiness and shouts of joy.

Harton Puzzlers at the First Lego League 2017

By L Forster8th December 2017

After months of preparation, including: selecting new teammates; talking to water professionals, robot programming and reprogramming when things went wrong; survey taking, poster making and many more tasks, the day was finally upon us. On the 7th of December the Harton Puzzlers took part in the First Lego League’s Hydrodynamics challenge, as South Shields Museum.

We started our day with practises in ‘the Pit’, a room where all the groups were based. Our initial runs proved less successful than they were at school. Our first Robot challenge on the table gave us a score of 45 points. This was then followed by our technical talk – explaining our robot design and strategy for completing our table run.

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After a brief break in the Pit, we had to complete our presentation to the panel of judges. We talked through our idea to help the human water cycle – a water butt for using rain water to flush the toilet. We used bottles to show the amount of water it takes to flush a toilet (7.27L per flush!) and made a model made from Lego (obviously) to show how our design works.

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Next we had a long break until our next robot challenge, so we spent this time with half the group practising and altering the programming, and the other half talking to the other groups and getting them to take part in our Wayne Drop video game. They had to try and get Wayne from the clouds to our water butt, but avoiding leaves and birds flying past. Everybody got very competitive when playing and wanted to make it onto the leader board – including the organisers and Mrs Ratcliffe, when she visited us for support.

Our next robot challenge proved better than the first, with a new score of 50 points (5 were deducted because we had to pick up the robot from a mistake). Straight after this we had our ‘Teamwork’ challenge. We were given a task, to sort out a box of Lego and show how well we can work together as a team. This was followed by our final robot challenge with a higher score of 60 – missing out of 15 points from the tripod not landing in the desired position.

Here is the video of our final robot challenge:

We unfortunately missed out of the semi-finals – coming joint 5th – by only 5 points! We watched the semis and finals – with the Acers coming first!

The final part of our day was the presentations and awards ceremony. We did not win the day, however we did not come home empty handed. For our second year running, we won the Teamwork Trophy! Something we were incredibly pleased to achieve.

Our year 6’s are looking forward to a lunchtime outside, and the year 5’s will be keeping an eye out for the year 4 children they might want to join the team next year.

Lego League – Visit with Mr Robson, from Northumbrian Water

By L Forster9th November 2017

On Wednesday the 9th of November, the Lego League Harton Puzzlers had a visit from a water expert to help them with their Image result for hydrodynamics legoproject. John Robson from Northumbrian water listened to our ideas and helped us to develop them further.

 

We shared our idea of an ‘Eco-friendly’ toilet flush!

When it rains, the rainwater runs down the drainpipes and collects into a drum. We can then use the collected rainwater to flush our toilet.

John quizzed us on our ideas – for example, how would we get the water to an upstairs toilet?

We addressed this by installing a pump in the drum. John also helped us to extend this idea further – by suggesting we install a turbine in the drainpipe. This would allow us to generate electricity (meaning our product powers itself!).

Furthermore, we have the option to use a float in the drum. This will generate further power through the raising and lowering of the water: allowing our product work on renewable energy, and on a very small scale lowering CO2 use.

We have taken on board his ideas and developed our idea to match this expert advice, which we believe will make our product more appealing, eco-friendly and an overall better product.