By NewsLine Staff
mail@floridanewsline.com
The Greenland Pines Cou-Gears are part of the First Lego League Challenge, a Lego-based organization that gives teams (with students from fourth through eighth grade) an opportunity to learn STEM skills, coding and teamwork. Each year a new theme is chosen and given to all teams. This year, the theme was “Submerged” and teams had four parts to address: Innovation Project, Robot Design, Robot Games and Core Values. Teams have to work together to find an ocean-themed problem that they can help solve, and the Cou-Gears’ choice was about submarines that can reach the Midnight Zone. Students had to talk to experts and use feedback given to them to improve their project. They also had to design a Lego robot that, through coding only, would maneuver around a themed table while completing various missions for points (Robot Games). Then, at competitions, they had to present their project to a table of judges and discuss as a team why they chose their problem and how it would help others, talk about the robot they designed, and answer a variety of questions from the panel. Each of these parts are weighted and combined for an overall score.
At the district competition in November 2024, the Cou-Gears didn’t know what to expect for their first tournament besides getting experience for future years. They wore their team tees, Lego-inspired glasses, and made sure they had fun while learning about the competition. They won an award for their Innovation Project, placed third in the Robot Games, and qualified for the regional tournament in Alachua County in January.
In Gainesville, 60 teams from Northeast Florida competed, each with their own robot, Innovation Project and hopes for advancing even further. At the end of the two-day event, the Cou-Gears earned fourth place for Core Values (sportsmanship) and did well enough in the other categories to qualify for the two-day state competition at Sea World Orlando in February.
Photo courtesy Kara Coleman
Greenland Pines Elementary Cou-Gears.
