The Harton Primary Puzzlers attended The Word for their regional Lego League competition – going up against other schools (both primary and secondary) from South Tyneside, Teesside and Durham.

The children took part in 3 robot games, a team work task and delivered a presentation to share their innovation idea to a panel of judges.

Their project was praised by the judges as being incredible, with little to no improvement they could suggest. Our innovation project was the ‘Skipatron 5000’ – a skipping rope that generates electricity, allowing us to use the kinetic energy of the children on a school yard to charge a device, and take pressure off the National Grid. We devised and developed this product with the help of Suez TeesValley, Equinor, Skipping School and SeaJacks.

Winner of the Skips, with 44 skips.

We used our prototype – built with the help of our friend Danny, from SeaJacks – to hold a skipping competition in the pit. The person with the highest score won a bag of Skips. Children from every other team attending had a go. Even Mrs Ratcliffe joined in.

The robot games were tense, but enjoyable. The 2 robot teams worked very hard to start the robot in the correct place every time, in order to hit the mission in the correct place.

Getting ready to start

Telling Mr Forster to calm down.

Getting ready

After lunch, the children were told they were one of the top 4 teams in the robot game, and would have 2 more attempts to make it to the finals. With a score of 195, they progressed to the finals – another 3 runs to try and score the highest amount of points to win.

Some children were not impressed with the teachers’ enthusiasm.

Showing that it is not all about winning, after their last game the children (lead by Jacob) asked the judges to wait before calculating their score to walk around the table and shake the hands of the opposing team – showing incredible sportsmanship, teamwork and character. In the finals, the children repeated their high score of 195, but were just beaten with 205 points from the opposing team (the highest score of the day).

The day ended with the award ceremony – and taking into account the Core Values, the presentation and the robot game – the Harton Primary Puzzlers were awarded the Championship trophy!

They will once again proudly represent South Tyneside in the national competition in Harrogate in April.