A Geelong primary school will send an eight-student team to the First Lego League Competition national finals in Sydney after qualifying at the state finals this month.
Christ the King Primary School’s Cre8te the Future team won the Core Values Award at the state event on Monday, November 11, earning a spot at the national event at Macquarie University in Sydney on Sunday, December 1.
Students design and code a Lego robot to complete tasks and complete an innovation project, developing a real-world solution to an identified problem. The Core Values Award goes to a team that has excelled in both areas and embodied the competition’s six values.
The Cre8te the Future team investigated ways to reduce microplastics released by dishwashers.
Grade 5/6 teacher and team co-coach Carolyn Freebairn said the team’s project began with a visit to Queenscliff Marine Discovery Centre.
“The overall theme for this year was ‘submerged’, so it was all about life below water,” Ms Freebairn said.
“We did an excursion down to the Queenscliff Marine Discovery Center. While talking to one of the teachers there, one topic that kept coming up was microplastics and their impact on the ocean environment.
“So that was where our thinking really started as to what we might be able to investigate.”
The students designed and 3D-printed a special dishwasher filter, explained team member and grade six student Asher.
“We designed a filter to fit into a dishwasher filter, but it will catch microplastics instead of food,” Asher said.
“We designed it and 3D printed it using the technology we have at school. We called it the Microplastic Separator 3001, or MPS 3001.”
This will be the seventh consecutive year Christ the King teams have qualified for the national level of the competition.
Ms Freebairn said the event aligned well with the school’s project-based learning (PBL) teaching strategy.
“There’s so much teamwork that goes along with it, they give up a lot of lunch times and it’s very much a collaborative process,” she said.
“We also see the learning they do in our normal PBL cycle being transferred into the Lego League, getting that deep understanding of the cycle we do and how it fits with those real world applications.”
