Contestants ages 9 to 14 took part in the annual FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge Long Island Championship, which was sponsored by School-Business Partnerships of Long Island, Inc. (SBPLI) and held remotely on April 17 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Team #45172 “Meteorites Cubed” from Hicksville won the Champion’s Award. The top teams won by embodying the program’s Core Values of teamwork and mutual respect while achieving excellence and innovation in both a robot game and innovative project.

FIRST LEGO League Challenge is an international program for 9- to 16-year-old children (ages vary by country) created in a partnership between FIRST and the LEGO Group in 1998 to get children excited about science and technology — and teach them valuable career and life skills. Children work alongside adult Mentors to design, build, and program autonomous robots using LEGO® Education SPIKETM Prime or LEGO® MINDSTORMS® and create an innovative solution to a problem as part of their Innovation Project.

This year’s Challenge — RePLAYSM — called for teams to identify a problem related to people not being active enough, research the problem and design a new piece of technology or improve an existing one to help them solve that problem.

Twenty-one teams took part in the Championship. The competition is judged in three areas: Innovation Project; Robot Design, and Core Values, which embody aspects of teamwork and good sportsmanship. Top robot game scores are also honored. The award winners were as follows:

* The Champions Award winner is invited to participate in the FIRST LEGO League Virtual Open International in Greece on June 24-27, 2021.

This year’s Volunteer of the Year Award went to Rick Ramhap. The Coach/Mentor Award went to two coaches: Bryan Eichenauer of Team #45172 “Meteorites Cubed” from Hicksville and Maria Zografos of Team #22112 “The Royal Panthers” from Locust Valley.