A TEAM of Callington Community College students are set to represent the South West in the UK finals of the FIRST@LEGO@League (FLL) UK Challenge.

The regional final, which is sponsored by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), was held at the college in December.

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

The team from Callington were overall winners of the regional final and will go to Loughborough University in February to represent the South West in the UK finals.

The team of Sam Lane (Year 11), Paul Thomas (Year 11), Harry Warren (Year 10) and Joe Lane (Year 8) 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 programme a robot to complete different tasks involving all aspects of recycling — from composting to the demolition of models and sorting of the waste.

The competition took a whole day, with ten teams from eight schools from the South West 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.

FLL 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.

It is for young people aged 9 to 16 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.