Last Sunday Pamplona’s Recinto Ferial Refena (Refena Tradefair Site) hosted the Grand Finale of the FIRST LEGO® League Spain Competition, an international robot-building competition for schoolchildren held simultaneously around the world, in which the youngsters are challenged to design and build programmable robots using LEGO® parts. Participants come together in teams of 4 to 10 members and have the support of a coach who guides them for 10 weeks in the preparation of the tournament.

This year’s "Food Factor" challenge will stimulate the schoolchildren to explore the subject of food security, examining potential sources of food contamination and the best ways of heading them off. The schoolchildren compete in two categories: the time-trial robot-building competition and the presentation of the scientific research project.

The 19 knock-out rounds (Euskadi, Navarra, Tarragona, Barcelona, Lleida, Madrid, Málaga, Murcia, Girona, Asturias, Almería, Córdoba, Granada, Jerez, Castilla y León, Huelva, Jaén, Sevilla y Valencia) of the 2011-2012 competition involved a total of 400 teams and 3500 schoolchildren, the 34 qualifying teams then going on to Pamplona’s Grand Finale.

The Santperencs de Barcelona team was the outright winner of the final and now has one week to decide which international competition to go on to: the World Festival of San Luis (USA) from 25 to 28 April 2012 or the Open European Championship held in Mannheim (Germany) from 7 to 9 June 2012.

The teams finishing in second and third place, Santo Domingo de Asturias and LS Bideluze de Andoain, respectively, as well as the team winning the robot behavior prize, awarded to the Mechatronics Ants team of Pamplona, are also eligible for participating in one of the international championships.
GMV is the sole sponsor of FIRST LEGO League in Spain, providing resources for the organization of all the tournaments.