Fourth and fifth graders competed in the local First LEGO League City Shaper tournament over the Thanksgiving break and won an award for the building of their robot.

The Bright Builders team competed against more than 20 other elementary and middle school teams from Chattanooga and North Georgia. The tournament is held internationally and is more than 20 years old. This is the first year Bright School has competed. The Tennessee Valley Authority is a local sponsor of Chattanooga teams and provides the robots and competition tables.

The teams program small robots, which are about the size of toy dump trucks, to move around on a table and complete certain tasks like moving a stack of blocks to a certain place on the table. Teams earn points by completing tasks in two and a half minutes in several rounds. Also, the teams meet with judges privately to explain how they built and programmed the robots, talk about the core values of their team and what challenge they tried to take on related to cities. The Bright Builders chose to tackle the issue of parking in a city.

The team won the Strategy and Innovation Award for the building of their robot. The top nine teams in the tournament moved to compete in the region. The Bright Builders did not place in the top nine, but the team will compete this spring in another tournament.

The team is led by Assistant Head of School Renee' Kropff, network specialist Ray Park and Addison Spencer '99.

First LEGO League 2019