HÀ NỘI — A Vietnamese student team from the Wellspring School in Hà Nội has won the Innovative Poster Award of the First Lego League Jr. World Festival Expo, part of the three-day 2018 First Lego League event held in Houston, the United States, which wrapped up on Saturday.

The competition offers four top Innovative Awards, one in each category of Poster, Model, Programming and Research. This year is the first time Việt Nam has sent representatives to the competition.

The Innovative Poster Award this year was given to three teams: Team 14537, Wellspring of Việt Nam; Team 6007, the Water Saviors of Tampa, Fla. and Team 9808, the Sea Mustangs of Sugar Land, Texas.

First Lego League Jr. World Festival Expo introduces children ages 6 to 9 to the world of science and technology. In this year’s Challenge, AQUA ADVENTURE^SM, 16,767 teams used Lego elements and Lego Education WeDo 2.0 to build and programme a moving model, and then share their discoveries about where water comes from and what happens on its way to people.

Team 12102, the student team of HCM City’s Lê Ngọc Hân – Lạc Long Quân Primary School, reportedly won the Model Design Awards at the expo. Team 14536, the student team from Hai Bà Trưng Primary School, won the Building and Discovery Award. The Western Australian International School of HCM City also attended the First Lego League World Festival but did not win any awards.

The four Vietnamese teams beat almost 200 teams from 120 schools nationwide at the First Lego League Việt Nam 2018, which took place in HCM City on January 27-28.

First Lego League introduces students aged 9-16 to real-world engineering challenges by inviting them to conduct research projects and build Lego-based autonomous robots to complete tasks on a thematic playing surface. This year’s challenge, HYDRO DYNAMICS^SM, tasked more than 280,000 students on 35,226 teams representing nearly 90 countries with improving the human water cycle. — VNS