West Linton Primary pupils win Lego challenge

A team of pupils from a Borders primary has won a Lego science and technology challenge qualifying them for a world event in America.

The West Linton students triumphed in the Institution of Engineering and Technology's (IET) First Lego League (FLL) UK and Ireland final.

Teams had to tackle the problem of dealing with waste as well as designing a robot.

The winners have been invited to go on to the FLL World Festival in St Louis.

The winning team, the West Linton Wasps, impressed judges with their advanced robotics skills, as well as their project, which investigated the problem of wasted vegetables from school lunches.

After finding that 60% of vegetables were not being eaten, the team introduced an incentive scheme where children earned tokens for eating vegetables. The tokens then earned prizes for each class.

The school has seen a 47% reduction in wasted vegetables and hopes to extend this scheme to other local schools.

Team members were Aedán Contier-Lawrie, Owen Jones, Jessica Levine, Cameron MacKay, Rebecca Moroney, Louis Myatt, Malcolm Rodwell, Logan Stewart, Alexander Walpole and Oscar Weipers.

Gail Jackson, one of the team's coaches, said: "We had an amazing, never to be forgotten day.

"The children loved the whole experience and can't wait to take our robot and our project presentation to the world championships."

IET President Naomi Climer said it ran the competition to show young people "how creative, exciting and rewarding" engineering could be.

"In order to tackle the engineering skills gap we need more graduates to enter the profession," she added.

"This can only happen if more school-age children are attracted to, and choose to study STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects - competitions like FLL are therefore vital."