Help the Penpol Pumpkins get to Massachusetts

We are a group of Year 6 students from Penpol School in Cornwall, UK who are taking part in the FIRST LEGO League for the second and final time. As Year 6’s we’ll soon be leaving Penpol and going our separate ways to Secondary School.

Our journey started with spending our lunchtimes in the Mac Suite, working hard on designing our robot, researching food waste and recycling across the county for our project and developing our ideas to present our findings. We won our regional event in Cornwall and got invited to the Great British Finals in Harrogate last month. Here we managed to wow the judges and walked away with one of the top prizes for our Innovation Project, as well as coming in second place overall in the country!

Today we’re thrilled to discover that all our hard work has paid off and that we’ve been invited to Massachusetts, USA to represent Great Britain in an International Competition! This is a dream come true and is something we could never have believed was a possibility when we first started building our LEGO robot two years ago. It's surreal, but a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience for the ten of us.

Getting to America is going to be a very expensive trip and as a school it isn’t something we can do by ourselves. We don’t have a final price yet, but our teacher Mr Woolcock thinks it could be around the £25,000 mark to get all ten of us and our teachers to the competition and back – which would include flights, travel to and from airports, hotels, competition entry fees, food etc. Because the competition is in just 4 weeks the prices for everything are super expensive already.

We're so grateful for you taking the time to read this and for hopefully supporting us.

You can find out more information about our journey so far here .

The Penpol Pumpkins + Mr Woolcock