FIRST LEGO League Challenge 2026 – It’s a wrap!
This weekend saw the culmination of the 2025/26 FIRST LEGO League Challenge season in the UK, with the national finals taking place at the Harrogate Convention centre.
After running five regional tournaments across the North East earlier in the year, I was lucky enough to spend Saturday 25th April as a judge at the finals.
Delivered by the fantastic FIRST LEGO League team from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), it was another amazing event that completely filled up my cup with joy, gratitude and inspiration from the amazingly talented young people there. The IET do an incredible job putting on an event of this scale, with a relatively small team. Their hard work and dedication to the programme is amazing!
68 teams from all over the UK competed to become UK champions, alongside teams from Brazil, Slovenia, France, Germany and Kazakhstan who competed for international awards.
The joy of judging
The talent, energy and passion from the young people never ceases to amaze me. Some of the robots and attachments they create to solve fiendishly difficult problems in the Robot Game are amazing and their code to make it all happen, reliably and efficiently, is an illustration of problem solving at its best.
But it’s not all robots in FIRST LEGO League Challenge. I really love being a judge and having the opportunity to see the detail behind the Innovation Projects and Robot Design work that teams have spent months on. We also get to see and evaluate their Core Values as we talk to them about their work.
I saw some wonderful projects this year, including robots designed to support archaeologists in their field work and a fully working, AI powered app for people to upload photos of things they discover to.
The AI scanned the images of the items and gave the user suggestions about what it could be and information around it. Users could share their discoveries with experts and others and take on discovery challenges. These are genuine innovations that can have real-world impact. We certainly met some of the engineers of the future!
Team North East
Our five regional champion teams.
From our five Education North Tyneside regional tournaments, we were delighted to see our champion teams representing the North East at the national finals:
- BDP Archaeology Allstars - Benton Dene Primary School,
- Mission:Possible! - George Stephenson High School
- Nerdwerkz – Independent Alnwick team
- The Climate Councillors – Ian Ramsey Academy
- She Can Code Society – Durham High School.
All five teams were all brilliant and represented the region superbly, but team Mission:Possible! from George Stephenson High School came out on top to take home the prestigious Core Values award. This recognises outstanding demonstration of the six FIRST LEGO League Core Values: discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork, and fun.
They are only the second North Tyneside team to win a major award at the extremely competitive national finals and, as they were quick to tell me, the first all-girls team to do so!
I was lucky enough to be sitting with them at the awards ceremony, and they were so proud and excited when they won. A huge well done to them and their teacher Natalie Fenn, who does a fantastic job coaching and supporting them and works so hard to promote STEM in her school, especially to girls.
You can see the moment they are announced as winners and their trophy presentation here. You can also see the BDP Archaeology Allstars from Benton Dene Primary in action at the Robot Game tables here. They were fantastic!
We should also celebrate the overall champion team: End_Tec, who I was lucky enough to have in my judging room. I can honestly say their presentations were some of the finest I’ve seen in my many years of being involved in FIRST LEGO League. They were phenomenal, and go on to represent the UK in Mexico. I know they’ll do us proud.
Other North East heroes
As well as our champion teams, I must also recognise the achievements of some of our other friends from the north. Eight other volunteers from our regional events made the trip to Harrogate, but two deserve a special mention.
Andrew Casey from one of our regional sponsors, Sage, has been volunteering his time to referee robot games at our regional tournaments and the national finals for years. He certainly knows his stuff and does a brilliant job supporting the children through the pressure of a robot game under the lights and against the clock. He was quite rightly recognised with a volunteer award for refereeing, at this year’s finals. Well done Andrew!
Emily Ord, a computing teacher from Tweedmouth Middle School, has been bringing her students to our regional events for years.
She is FIRST LEGO League obsessed and has over 100 students attending her robotics clubs and inspires them to take on STEM learning with her passion and humour. But not satisfied with just being an awesome team coach, Emily has volunteered at our regional and the national finals, and this year, she took on the big challenge of commentating and hosting the robot games, alongside the fantastic Aram Hare. Clearly robbed of a career in TV she did an amazing job of presenting and shining a light on the teams at the tables. You can see lots of her on the YouTube live stream of the event. Great job Emily!
Thank you!
As our FIRST LEGO League Unearthed season comes to close, I’d like to thank the hundreds of students, coaches and volunteers that have been part of our events.
In particular, our sponsors Sage (North Tyneside and Northumberland), Aspire Technology Solutions (Gateshead) and Johnson Matthey (Teesside) played a huge part in allowing so many young people to have a fantastic STEM experience, something I’m sure many of them will remember for many years.
Redcar and Cleveland College and Gateshead College also played a massive role, providing fantastic venues and support from their wonderful staff and students.
We are so grateful to you all and hope to see you all again next season.
What next?
Before we completely put our trowels and brushes away and wave goodbye to the archaeological Unearthed theme, we have two FIRST LEGO League Explore festivals taking place on the 7th July.
Explore is the junior version of the programme, for pupils aged 6-9. We can’t wait to see what they’ve been learning about as they show off their building and coding skills and all they have learned with their team posters.
A new theme and challenge awaits after that, as we enter the 2026/27 season. It will be the last ever FIRST LEGO League season as FIRST and LEGO recently announced their decision to pursue different competition directions beyond that. It’s hard not to feel sad about that at this point. FIRST LEGO League has been an amazing part of many people’s lives for a long time. Just come to any event and speak to people there to understand the passion people have for the programme and the impact it has on young people.
Next season may be a bit emotional, but there will be new opportunities and competitions to explore beyond that, and we’ll certainly make sure that the young people of the North East continue to have access to those opportunities.
Ready to find out more?
If you are interested in being part of our FIRST LEGO League events in any kind of way, take a look at our computing curriculum website or please get in touch.
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