On the 21^st of March, four pupils from Colm’s fifth class attended Limerick Racecourse for the Lego Robotics Munster Semi-Final. These four pupils were Feidhlim, Mia, Orla and Rían. We arrived at around nine in the morning and we found our table. There were forty schools attending the semi-final on the day. Our first task was to construct a vehicle out of a lego set and instructions that they gave us. We had a few hours to build it and programme it to move. We spent an hour figuring out the instructions and then we had a lunch break. We went back to work after this and finished off the vehicle. While we were constructing, judges came to our table to look at our poster that was called ‘How can we help the ocean with technology and humans?’ We had completed this project in class before the semi-final. We explained our poster and we had a slide-show presentation showing the robot turtle that we had made to help the sea. Our idea was to send the robot turtle to the bottom of the ocean to collect rubbish and to clean the water.

The judges seemed to really like our project, and we received full marks on it. After about three hours of constructing and coding, our vehicle was complete. The judges told us to stop working and then the challenge part of the competition started. This was when we had to put our vehicle on the track and test out whether we had coded it properly. Our vehicle made one wrong turn in our first go, but we re-coded it and it flew through the track the next time. After this, we waited to see the results of the competition. We were so amazed when we heard that Knockanean had received the highest points and that we would be progressing to the next stage of the competition which is on the 5^th of April in Analog Devices in Limerick. Overall it was a great day out and we had so much fun building and coding!

By Feidhlim Sullivan and Mia Hedigan.