FIRST LEGO League North Tyneside & Northumberland 2026
Last week we completed three days of incredible FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge regional tournament events for North Tyneside and Northumberland.
These events are always such a privilege to be involved with. They are the culmination of months of hard work for students, teachers, volunteers and our team too!
What is FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge?
FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge is a global STEM competition. Teams of up to ten children aged 9-16 years old, work together to explore the annual theme. Students must design, build and program an autonomous LEGO® robot to solve a series of missions. They are scored on the success of their missions and judged on their robot design, engineering and coding.
Teams also complete and present an Innovation Project where they must come up with an innovative solution to a real-world problem, linked to the annual theme. Through it all, they must also demonstrate the FIRST® LEGO® League Core Values.
This incredible programme is delivered by FIRST® and LEGO Education® to over 100 countries around the world, and here in the UK by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
As regional delivery partners, Education North Tyneside has been running FIRST® LEGO® League events since 2014, when we ran our first Challenge tournament with just six teams. Since then, we’ve delivered FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge and Explore events to over 4000 young people across the North East, partnering with Northumberland County Council in recent years, to help grow the programme. We also deliver events for Gateshead and Teesside schools.
A season of firsts
Our three events last week were regional tournament finals for the 2025/26 ‘Unearthed’ season. This year’s theme has had teams finding out about archaeology and coming up with innovative ways to solve problems an archaeologist might have.
Across three tournament days we welcomed 58 teams from 48 schools. A total of 480 students and 95 volunteers.
The events are always special in many ways, but this year was full of firsts: new teams, new volunteers, new friends, new winners, our first ever international teams and our first special school attending a tournament. As well as lots of fantastic returning teams and volunteers.
Going international
We were delighted to welcome students, staff and visitors from Ahtoo Montessori School from Accra, Ghana. This came from a partnership with The Maker Place, an organisation doing great things to promote and provide STEM learning opportunities to young people in Ghana. We extend our thanks to their founder and CEO, Douglas Ayitey, who was instrumental in making this visit possible and we salute his passion for STEM education.
It was such a pleasure to welcome their two teams to the North East, to spend some time getting to know them, and for them and our UK teams to be able to interact and share their experiences. Their students gave a fantastic performance and took three trophies, medals and certificates back to Ghana. We hope to continue this collaboration with The Makers Place in the future, and give more Ghanaian students the chance to visit the UK for STEM events.
The group even managed to squeeze in a trip to St James’ Park to see Newcastle vs Barcelona to round of a memorable trip for them all.
A winning partnership
For the teams, one of the goals of FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge is about learning to work as a team. As delivery partners, teamwork is equally important. It’s impossible to organise and run these events without a huge team of volunteers and support from other organisations.
Our North Tyneside and Northumberland events are run in collaboration with Sage and Northumberland County Council.
A global company, based here in the North East, Sage have been incredible supporters of FIRST® LEGO® League since 2017. They fund the competition entry fees for our schools and LEGO Education robot kits.
Sage also fund our tournament venue and provide an army of volunteers, through their Sage Foundation volunteering programmes. We are so grateful to have their support which has enabled thousands of young people to have amazing STEM experiences over the years.
Our winners
Huge congratulations to all our category winners over the week, but a special mention to ‘Mission: Possible!’ from George Stephenson High School, ‘BDP Archaeology All Stars’ from Benton Dene Primary School and ‘Nerdwerkz’, an independent team from Alnwick. They were our three champion teams and will now progress to represent the region at the FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge national finals on 25th April.
We are proud of them all and wish them the very best of luck!
More event photos
Ready to find out more?
If you are interested in finding out more about FIRST LEGO League and getting involved as a team or volunteer, please get in touch.
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