Weber State University hosted the LEGO League Utah North State Championship on Feb. 1 with over 49 teams hoping to represent Utah at the national level.
The LEGO League competitions have been around for the past 20 years but only for 10 years here in the state of Utah. This is the fourth time WSU has hosted the championship.
Participants compete against one another to make it to the national level at the championship in Houston, Texas in April.
Teams traveled in from Nephi to Logan, and participants were as young as nine and as old as 14.
In order for teams to compete at the state level, they must qualify for the event and display their personal projects throughout the Shepard Union.
“I feel that it’s important; the LEGO League helps kids learn so many things like coding, engineering, design and science,” Dana Dellinger, director for the center of technology outreach at WSU, said.
This LEGO competition is part of the program called S.T.E.M.
Each team decides on an issue in their world, then they must come up with how they could fix the issue, and finally, the team presents their experiment.
“We decided as a team that our problem was the inversion in the Salt Lake City area,” Member of the FPM2 team Liesel said.
FPM2 presented their results and had surveyed 86 people about the inversion. Only 10% used masks when they go outside.
The LEGO championships allow students to actively learn from science and technology and build confidence within their teams.
“S.T.E.M. is great for kids in the state of Utah to be involved in. All of it comes with teaching core values, and you can see the core values of these kids based on their behavior,” Dellinger said.
