Using Lego robots to problem-solve

Benjamin Donne-Lee, Jonathan Vanden Brink, Christina Donne-Lee, Hannah Vanden Brink and Isaac Donne-Lee are preparing for the Lego League championships.PHOTO/STUART MUNRO

A garage in Aramoho serves as a workshop and think tank for five young minds to work on projects ahead of an international competition that will take place in Auckland this Saturday.

Jonathan Vanden Brink, 15, and brothers Benjamin Donne-Lee, 14, and Isaac Donne-Lee, 13, are working with Lego robots while their sisters, Hannah Vanden Brink, 14, and Christina Donne-Lee, 10, are working on a project for the First Lego League (FLL) championships in Auckland the same day.

The team's mission is to help redesign how we gather knowledge and skills in the 21st century but they don't have to do it alone - more than 230,000 children aged 9-16 from over 70 countries will be taking up the challenge.

While the boys are busy programming and fine-tuning the robot the team have built using the Lego Mindstorms kit, Hannah and Christina are working on another project for the competition.

Their task is to "choose and solve a real-world problem" and they have selected people's inattention to news media as their topic.

"We are working on an idea for a game where a person watches a news video and they have to answer questions about the content before they can pass on to the next stage of the game" says Hannah.

"The idea is to encourage people to analyse news and think about it more," said Christina.

The competition is an annual event and the Donne-Lees came fifth in the robot competition last year while Isaac won the project section with his design for an app that measures the spread of volcanic ash.

Jonathan and Hannah recently moved with their family from Invercargill and both families are part of the Wanganui home school network.

They meet three times each week to work on the LLB projects and a big cheer goes up when the robot successfully negotiates its way between obstacles and returns to home base.

"We have to work out the correct number of rotations so it can complete the tasks without knocking things over or bumping into obstacles" says Benjamin.

Mum, Mandy Donne-Lee says the group have been fundraising. "The children have been selling chocolate and we have had support from BP, Wanganui Mitre 10 and Pak n Save."