MANILA - A group of Filipino kids won a robotics Lego competition in Houston, USA last month.

Six students from De La Salle Santiago Zobel in Muntinlupa City represented the Philippines in the FIRST Lego League (FLL), a global robotics competition, particularly the FLL World Championship Explore Division (ages 6-10), where they won the coding category award.

The event was held last April 19-22 at George Brown Convention Center in Houston.

The group, called "The Brick Titans, Philippines", is composed of Thoren Garcia, Markus Bellezza, Raphael Dollente, Brent Escalona, Carlo Ramos and Hugo Tan. They won the FLL national competition last February.

In line with the focus of the FLL this year on the global need for sustainable energy, the Philippine contingent's model was a renewable energy-powered community theme park, wherein wind turbines, solar panels, biomass facility, piezoelectric ceramics, and rain water collector (for hydro energy) serve as sources of energy, their camp said in a statement sent to ABS-CBN News.

They used Lego pieces with moving parts, developing a programming/coding that allowed such parts as turbines and ferries wheel in their model to function as they do in real theme parks.

Garcia, 8, a Grade 2 student, said he hopes that even at a very young age, they are able to help promote sustainable energy through their winning design.

“For now, we explain to our friends and other people about our theme park. And maybe later on, we can inform the government to try to build it because we’re helping our country," he said in the statement.

"Because our country is starting to have pollution. And pollution is bad for our environment. If we continue using non-renewable energy resources, our plants will die and there will no longer be crops for food,” he added.

The FLL aims to explore solutions to real world problems by asking the participants to come up with a unique solution by focusing on fundamental engineering as they design and code/program a model made of Lego bricks, the Philippine contingent's camp said.

The next edition of the competition is expected to carry another theme, according to Garcia's mother, Athena, who accompanied the contingent in Houston.

Joyce Calica, the program coordinator for the Institutional Robotics team of De La Salle Santiago-Zobel, said the competition taught the students to gain real world problem-solving experience through a guided global robotics program.

“They were able to develop being patient with one another. They learned how to cooperate with one another. They knew that if they will be able to know the different brick parts, how to build those Legos, their creativity are also developed,” said Calica.

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