We are Bexley’s First Lego League Challenge Team, the Bexley Bots.  Our members are Macin Davis, Lila Marcovitch, Lara Pollock, Asher Rubin, Weston Weiker and Drew Winkle.  First Lego League is an international Lego and robotics competition for kids aged 3rd through 7th grade.  The goal is to build a robot out of Lego and code it to accomplish certain missions provided by the Challenge competition.   While Lego is fun for everyone, we learned coding and robotics, which is challenging.

Part of the competition was to work on an innovation project. Teams chose a problem in the world that can be solved with the use of technology.  We chose to look at how technology can help encourage more people to read. We researched the current trends in reading and technology. We even went to Gramercy Books in Bexley to interview the staff about what they were seeing in reading trends.

Our innovative idea was to help people who feel like they don’t have enough time to read find more time to read by developing an electronic reading device that follows its owner around making reading accessible anywhere.

As part of First Lego League, we entered an 18 team regional competition to test our skills against kids, most 4 years older than us.   At the competition, we presented our innovation project and watched our robot complete the tasks we coded it for. At the awards, we were surprised to win first place for our innovation project as a rookie team!  It was amazing to go up on stage as a team and get a trophy.  Even though we didn't place in the top 7 overall teams to advance to the state championship, we had so much fun and we can’t wait until next year!