Meet the 'Sustainable 7' from Sunderland's St Benet's Primary School, who are off to the national final of the First Lego League competition

The ‘Sustainable 7’ have spent the past few months designing, building and programming a robot using Lego Mindstorms technology as part of the First Lego League competition.

Their GT4 energy creator is designed to be situated out at sea, similar to an oil rig, and uses four renewable energy sources to replace solar farms and wind turbines and help store energy more efficiently.

They were inspired by Nissan’s drive for a greener future and the idea for their robot model is that it would help provide energy in the production of the Wearside factory’s electric Leaf car – a design which has already impressed bosses at the car plant.

The company unveiled its Nissan EV36Zero in 2022, a £1billion flagship Electric Vehicle (EV) Hub creating a world-first EV manufacturing ecosystem to supercharge the company's drive to carbon neutrality, which helped sparked the children’s imaginations.

The Year 6 pupils at the primary school in Fulwell have already won the regional finals, which were held at Nissan in February.

Now, they’re off to the national finals in Harrogate, where they’ll be competing with teams from across the country, and, if successful, they’ll be off to Houston, Texas, for the international finals.

The team, who’ve worked alongside school volunteers John Baharie and Derek Merrington on the project, have applied a number of skills in their model including science, engineering, technology, communication, team building and a huge amount of imagination.

Daniel Quinn, 11, said: “We’ve learnt that, even as a young person, you can do some pretty great stuff. Someone at Nissan even said this could be a possibility for the future, so it shows that even as a young person you can do great things.”

Grace Cummings, 11, added: “We weren’t really friends before this. When we’ve come together for this, we’ve spent nearly every lunch time and break together working on this and we’ve learnt that you can be friends with people you work with loads, and we’ve also learnt how to programme robots.”

As well as presenting their project at competition level, the team has presented it to Sunderland City Council leader Graeme Miller, as well as at school assemblies.

St Benet’s deputy head and Year 6 teacher, Lisa Rice, said the school are immensely proud of the Sustainable 7.

She said: “Taking part in the First Lego League competition has been an amazing opportunity for the children to grow in confidence and skill.

"These 10 and 11-year-olds have worked as an incredible team to come up with with an energy solution to solve a problem in their community.

"Their creative approach and ability to continuously improve their ideas has helped them design something that could be a possibility in the future.

"Hopefully, through this experience, the children may one day further develop their passion for design and engineering.”

The Sustainable 7 is made up of: Rory Dixon, 10, Daniel Quinn, 11, Grace Cummings, 11, Ethan Crew, 11, Reuben Kilty, 11, Hannah Bransby, 10 and Louisa Harris, 11.