InTucker Magazine

LEGO Lords

FIRST LEGO League (FLL), the partnership program between For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST and LEGO Education, has encouraged interest in coding and robotics for almost thirty years. The competition engages thousands of elementary and middle school students from around the world in research, design and programming solutions to themed problems. This year the Tucker community was represented by the LEGO Lords team.

The LEGO Lords began as an opportunity for a group of friends to spend time together.

It wasn’t their first experience with FLL. In second grade, they had taken part in FLL’s noncompetitive Explore season. In Explore, a team of two to six elementary schoolers meets regularly to build motorized robotic LEGO models over a period of twelve weeks. The experience teaches teamwork, communication and critical thinking skills and serves as an introduction to programming.

“We started to learn the basics of coding and how to program the robot,” said William.

Fast forward to fourth grade, where friends Dhilan, Luke, Alan, Jack, William and Eli would no longer all attend the same school. FLL seemed like a great opportunity to meet outside of school hours, and the students were now old enough for the competitive league.

“We thought it would be a fun little extracurricular thing that the kids would do together to keep them seeing each other,” said their coach, Tricia Glennie.

They definitely spent time together. In fact, they made a chart of the hours they met from September 2025 through February 2026 to work on their FLL project.

“We actually spent 543 hours together,” William confirmed.

This season of FIRST LEGO League featured the UNEARTHED Challenge. FLL boasts that each of their seasons’ themes is based on a real-world STEM topic. Field experts work with FLL to design the Challenge topic, and participants learn about the fi eld while building and programming their robots to complete the Challenge events, or missions. The UNEARTHED Challenge exposed participants to archaeological concepts and problem solving.

The LEGO Lords spent weeks building, programming and testing their robot. They learned to communicate their ideas with each other and combine them for improvement. Each of the LEGO Lords rotated roles to gain experience in different parts of the project. They named their competitive robot “Derpy 6-7” after the tiger from the KPop Demon Hunters movie and the 6 7 meme. They even created their own cheer utilizing the juggling hand motion familiar to the Generation Alpha cohort.

The robot they built with their LEGO Education kit natively operated in the simple Spike Prime coding base, and the team quickly found that it would not drive the robot in a straight line exactly the way they wanted. They switched to Pybrix, a more complex coding base, and Jack even progressed from block programming to writing Python code to create a menu for their coding platform.

“It was very impressive for a fourth grader to make that leap,” said Tricia Glennie, “and we are very proud of him. It was an amazing thing…and so our robot would not have moved an inch without Jack this season.”

The LEGO Lords went into their rookie season knowing they would have fun, but they never anticipated the scale of their journey. Their first robotics competition was the Chamblee High FLL Regional where they won the Champion’s Award. After winning Regionals, they moved on to Super Regionals and won both the Innovation Project Award and the Champion’s Award, qualifying them for the state competition at Georgia Tech in January 2026. The LEGO Lords won third place in robot design at state and qualified for the Western Edge Invitational, a multiday FLL competition in California. Of the 574 teams that competed during the season, only the top 12 advanced to the postseason.

To reach Western Edge, the LEGO Lords had to fundraise.

“Could we have done it without the support of our community?” Tricia Glennie asked, to a chorus of “No!” from the team. From hot dog stands to spirit nights to sponsorships, the team raised $27,000 for their trip, $2,000 over their goal.

Out of 88 teams from around the world competing at Western Edge, only two were from Georgia, and as ten-year-olds, the LEGO Lords were some of the youngest competitors. They came home from Western Edge with their personal best score of 370 points on a single robot table run and the second finalist award for Core Values in recognition of their teamwork, inspiration and gracious professionalism.

Their journey sparked local interest in LEGO robotics. The LEGO Lords created a dancing robot that they showed their basketball friends, and they brought their UNEARTHED robot to Tucker City Council to show attendees.

“At school, a lot of kids want to do it,” said Luke. “Pretty much every single boy in my class wants to do it.”

They took the opportunity to share interest in something they loved and promote STEM education for their classmates.

With the assistance of their coach, the LEGO Lords applied for and secured a STEM grant from the Burns & McDonnell Foundation for the GLOBE Academy. This grant will fund the purchase of robots for each K-5 technology class and provide extra robotics kits for two new FLL competitive teams for the ’26-’27 year. The LEGO Lords look forward to learning more about robotics in class and mentoring the new teams.

“But we’ll still have our team, right?” William asked. Jack and Eli quickly reassured him that they would.

Now that they know what to expect, they’ve set their sights high for next season; the LEGO Lords want to make it all the way to the World Championship in Houston.

The next and final season of FIRST LEGO League kicks off August 4, 2026 with the theme BIOGLOW, an exploration of biodiversity in the world’s ecosystems. BIOGLOW Founders Edition will be available in Explore for grades two through four and Challenge for grades four through eight. BIOGLOW Future Edition Leagues will be open to kindergarten through second grade and third through eighth grade.

For more information on FIRST LEGO League and how to participate, visit firstlegoleague.org