A group of children from Co Wicklow will travel to Detroit in the US this week to represent Ireland at the Lego robotics world championships.
The First Lego League challenges teams to research a real-world problem and then develop a solution, as well as designing, building and programming a robot.
The Airbots team from Wicklow Montessori School have already won the regional championships in Galway earlier this year, as well as the UK and Ireland finals which took place in Bristol.
The competition involves four elements.
First the team must build a robot from Lego Mindstorms bricks, motors and other parts and then code it to perform certain tasks against the clock on a specially designed board.
The higher the number of tasks completed the more points secured.
Another challenge requires the team to identify a problem and a solution around the competition theme, which this year is Hydrodynamics or the study of fluid forces.
The Airbots decided to look at the problem of what happens to the water that is disposed of at airport security and came up with a number of different ideas around what it could be used for.
Team dynamics is the focus of the "Core Values" section of the competition, which focuses on how the group worked together to achieve their goals.
The final element of the competition requires the team members to explain how they designed and coded their robot to the judges, in order to demonstrate they did the work themselves and understand the technical aspects.
A group of children from Wicklow will travel to Detroit in the US this week to represent Ireland at the Lego robotics world championships. | https://t.co/2Yx8ei32lg pic.twitter.com/RVy7OnwWfY
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) April 23, 2018
The eight members of the team, who are all aged 11 and 12, will fly out for Detroit tomorrow and will set up on Wednesday.
They will then spend from Thursday to Saturday locked in competition with the 108 other teams participating.
This is the second year running that a team from the school has represented Ireland at the world championships.
Last year the Robo Riders competed in the world finals in Bath.
