The capital of Gipuzkoa will be, along with Deusto (Bilbao) and Mondragon, one of the three venues that will simultaneously host the international tournament FIRST LEGO League Euskadi. In the case of San Sebastian, around 350 young people from 35 teams in the three provinces will present their proposals at Eureka! Science Museum on the theme proposed this year: CITY SHAPER, building better environments in which to live and work, in which they must identify a problem in a building or public space in the city and propose an innovative solution.
The Department of Economic Development, through Fomento de San Sebastián, together with the Basque Agency for Innovation-Innobasque, is in charge of organizing the FIRST LEGO League Euskadi tournament in Donostia, in line with the strategy it has been carrying out for years in the city’s educational sphere to promote innovation skills through the Donostia Innovation Campus initiative that it is developing with schools, vocational training centres and universities, with the aim of helping young people improve their skills and possibilities for personal and professional development.
San Sebastian City Councilor Enrique Ramos pointed out that “our work strategy in Fomento de San Sebastián fits in with Innobasque’s commitment to STEM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) and innovation competitions through the prestigious FIRST LEGO League Euskadi tournament. It is important for us to attract and implement this dynamic in our city through the FLL Euskadi tournament so that we can raise awareness and communicate the importance of educating and training young people in these new technologies, but also in values. We intend to increase the number of students and schools in San Sebastian taking part in this programme and other initiatives that we are carrying out from Fomento de San Sebastián through the Donostia Innovation Campus programme in the coming years”.
The FIRST LEGO League Euskadi has worked for six months on a training programme with which the participating schoolchildren have learnt at first hand how researchers, technicians, professionals from fields such as architecture or engineering, technology centres, institutions and Basque universities work. On February 8th, Eureka-Zientzia Museoa will become the Donostian headquarters of the FIRST LEGO League, where nearly 350 young students from 35 Basque teams, divided into two categories, from 6 to 9 years old and from 10 to 16 years old, will defend their solutions to the challenge of this edition. The older ones will do so from three different areas:
Innovation project. The participants will present their proposals to solve a problem related to cities
Robot game. You will be competing with the LEGO MINDSTORMS robot that you will have had to design, build and program to overcome a series of missions.
FIRST LEGO League values. They will have to demonstrate that they have developed their projects around the following values: discovery, innovation, impact, teamwork and fun.
Fomento de San Sebastián is committed to innovation and talent as a key element in the socio-economic development of San Sebastian, where work in the educational stage is considered fundamental, promoting both the acquisition and development of certain technical skills and the handling of new technologies, as well as other more personal skills that are equally key to innovation, such as teamwork, creativity and the ability to express oneself, among others. This commitment is channelled by Fomento de San Sebastián through the Donostia Innovation Campus programme, where initiatives such as the recently completed Innovation Challenge are developed, where we confront young people with the challenges of the city so that they can work on proposals using these skills
In this edition of the FIRST LEGO League Euskadi, volunteering is very important as it represents the values of the program and makes it possible to develop the project in a friendly and fun environment, ensuring that the teams have a positive experience around science and technology. More than 70 volunteers will take part in Donostia, who will act as judges, referees, time controllers, team chaperones, etc. More than 600 people are expected to attend the event, including participants, volunteers and their families.
Sponsors of the FIRST LEGO League Euskadi in Donostia: TECNUN, ZUCCHETI, CAF, INKOR, AUSOLAN, EUREKA ZIENTZIA MUSEOA, BENGOA, REPLICATE EUROPEAN PROJECT