JELLY FRIENDS
AMERICA BLOG
a huge thanks to
our generous sponsors
Who are the Jelly Friends?
We are a group of nine Year 6 students from Cornwall, UK who are taking part in the FIRST LEGO League for the second and final time with Penpol School. As Year 6’s we’ll soon be leaving Penpol and going our separate ways to Secondary School.
For two years we’ve been working hard during our lunchtimes to build and code a LEGO Robot as well as creating an innovative jellyfish detecting wristband that lets you know if the jellyfish nearby are safe to swim with or not. We were thrilled to learn that all our hard work has paid off and that we’ve received a special invitation to represent Great Britain in an International Competition in Massachusetts, USA!
This website will tell you all about our journey so far, as well as sharing some way that you can help support us as we travel across the Atlantic to share our project in America
What have you been doing?
Two years ago we were inspired by our friends and school mates who, as the Penpol Pumpkins, had just got back from conquering the world in Massachusetts at the WPI Open Invitational Competition.
Seeing their passion, creativity and confidence inspired us to put our names down to join the Year 5 team and luckily we got picked! Ever since then we’ve used the example of the Pumpkins as a guiding light to try and become the best team we possibly can be, but we never dared to dream that we might follow in their footsteps all the way to America!
March 2024
Cornish Regional Final
RNAS Culdrose
Rising All Star Award
1st Place
We called ourselves The Dragons and learnt SO MUCH about how to build and code complex LEGO Robots as well as getting stuck in to our Innovation Project which was all about encouraging reluctant artists to pick up a pencil and start sketching with our Scratch drawing project.
We took part in the Cornwall Finals at RNAS Culdrose and came home with the Rising All-Star Award for the best new team, and a whole new level of excitement and enthusiasm for the competition and what might be possible.
March 2025
Cornish Regional Final
RNAS Culdrose
Champions Award
1st Place
We really worked hard to build on our previous success by pouring time and effort into our project. Our robot is more reliable, accurate and powerful that last year and our Innovation Project is in a whole new league!
We again took part at the Cornwall Finals at RNAS Culdrose but this time we came away with the Champions Award, as well as first place in three of the four areas of the competition!
This meant we earned a place at the National Finals in Harrogate.
May 2025
Great British Final
Harrogate
Team Pit Area Award
1st Place
We bought all of our Jelly Friends energy and excitement to Harrogate and pushed ourselves out of our comfort zones to speak to as many people as possible to tell them all about our Innovation Project.
We used our eye-catching Pit Area to bring people over and once there we explained our journey, our learning and our finished Stingsafe Wristband prototype.
We managed to give away over 500 badges in one day, which probably shows how many people we managed to speak to!
June 2025
International Open
Massachusetts, USA
We can't wait to head to Worcester, Massachusetts in June to take part against over 100 of the best teams in the whole world!
Regardless of the outcome, we know the experience alone will be absolutely life-changing.
We've learnt so much from our friends in the Penpol Pumpkins and we feel like we're in a really strong position for the competition itself - as long as we make a few more badges first!
So, what does the competition involve?
FIRST LEGO League is made up of four different components: Robot Games, Innovation Project, Core Values and Robot Design. The theme this year is called Submerged and is all about discovering and solving problems related to the ocean and ocean exploration. Here’s what we’ve been working on…
Innovation Project
Did you know over half of the students at Penpol School said they were scared to go in the ocean in case they got stung by a jellyfish? In fact, our research shows that adults feel the same way too!
The thing is though, most jellyfish are absolutely harmless – just ask Evangeline! We realised this misconception had to be challenged and we needed to make jellyfish friendly and safe to swim with. Our plan was simple – to let swimmers, surfers and divers know if the jellyfish sharing the water with them are safe, or if they might be a cause for concern.
To make this happen we researched and learnt about lots of different ideas, but settled on a wristband which lights up red or green depending on if the jellyfish is a friend or not. This will be powered by underwater cameras linked to a Machine Learning project which Molly has coded in Scratch with Google Teachable Machine and Machine Learning for Kids.
When created Sting Safe and shared our project with the judges at Culdrose. In fact, we were joined by more than the normal amount of judges as some other visitors got wind of what was happening and wanted to see for themselves.
During the presentation, we were joined by three visitors from Google Cloud who were at Culdrose to demo their own Machine Learning software. To say they were impressed by our project would be quite an understatement! We ended up getting 39 points out of 40 for our presentation – and we’re working on that last point!!
Robot Games
After we competed last year with the Masterpiece competition we realised that our robot was causing us problems. It was large and bulky to move around, tricky to lineup and took ages to swap over attachments. For this season we rebuilt our robot from the ground up to make it smaller, more precise and easier to line up.
We’ve also explored new ways of coding the robot this year, using sensors like the gyroscope to ensure our turns are as accurate and precise as possible.
Over the year we’ve been coding this robot to solve as many missions as possible and at Culdrose managed to get a high score of 290 points which was the second highest score of the competition.
Since then we’ve been working really hard back at school to improve our robot ahead of the National Final – in fact we achieved a high score of 410 points in school by creating new attachments and exploring new strategies for solving the missions.
We know the high score for the table this year is 620 and now we’ve got a few more weeks until our last competition we’re determined to pick up as many of those points as possible!
Core Values
Core Values are all about who we are as a team and how to approach challenges, opportunities and our learning. Embodying the Core Values of Discovery, Impact, Teamwork, Inclusion, Innovation and Fun comes naturally to us and we’re proud of just how far we’ve come – both as a team and as individual students.
Over these two years we’ve put in over a thousand hours of work between us, mostly during our lunch breaks, and have enjoyed (almost) every moment! From learning about jellyfish and how to train machine learning models to recognise venemous species to designing, building and coding our incredible LEGO Spike Prime robot, we’ve all learnt so much on this journey and made some amazing new friendships too.
As we’ve been working on our project this year we’ve been adding all of our ideas, research, code, photos and drawings to this shared document in Freeform. It charts our entire journey, although it’s very hard to see in a small photo. Thankfully in real life it’s much bigger – over five meters bigger in fact!
Robot Design
We’ve built our robot using LEGO SPIKE Prime and have coded it together using our iPad. We started off researching different robot designs and found the Coop Bot by Arvind Seshan to be the perfect starting point for this years challenge. Because of its flat edges we are able to precisely line up the robot at the start of every mission, ensuring greater reliability and precision.
The Robot Design presentation is all about sharing the journey we’ve been on as a team and how we’ve approached the Robot Games challenge. For this we decided to focus in on just one mission – the crabs.
As you can see our presentation tells the story of how we solved this mission, as well as all of the learning along the way.
Our robot has been built and coded almost entirely during our lunch breaks and in after school club this year and it’s been such a fun challenge to try and solve each of the missions. There’s nothing more satisfying than when you finally figure out a challenge that’s been bugging you for days!
Wow, You've worked so hard!
How can I help?
There’s no polite way to say this: we need money. Lots of money.
Getting to America is going to be a very expensive trip and as a school it isn’t something we can do by ourselves. We don’t have a final price yet, but our teacher Mr Woolcock thinks it could cost around £25,000 to get all nine of us and our teachers to the competition and back – which would include flights, travel to and from airports, hotels, competition entry fees, food etc.
To raise the funds we need, we’re offering three different ways to support us. Even if you’re not able to contribute financially, we’d be incredibly grateful if you could help by sharing our story with others.
Current Progress
%
last updated on
Thursday 29th May
at 9am
Donate to the Jelly Friends
Every donation is gratefully received and will help us realise our dream of competing against the very best teams in the world in June.
We're pleased to accept donations through GoFundMe, available below.
Share the Jelly Friends Story
Everybody can be a Jelly Friend, just by sharing this page! Does your uncle work in a company who might like to sponsor us? Perhaps your best friend might be able to donate a few pounds?
Sharing this page with people you know could lead to incredible things - we'd be so grateful if you helped us spread the word.
Sponsor the Jelly Friends
We’ll be proudly wearing our Jelly Friends T-shirts throughout our time in America — and wouldn’t it be cool if your company’s logo was on the back?
We’re offering space on our T-shirts to companies of all sizes, with sponsorships of £250 or more securing your logo on our shirts!
In exchange for your sponsorship you will receive the following:
Gold Sponsor: £5,000 +
- Your company logo on the top row of our t-shirts
- An invitation to meet with the team and watch their presentations
- A thank you video after the competition to share on Social Media
- An album of photos of the team in America which you will be able to share
- Your logo at the top of our America Blog website, which we'lll regularly be updating during our adventure.
- Our eternal gratitude!
Silver Sponsor: £1,000 +
- Your company logo on the second row of our t-shirts
- A thank you video after the competition to share on Social Media
- An album of photos of the team in America which you will be able to share
- Your logo on our America Blog website, which we'lll regularly be updating during our adventure.
- Our eternal gratitude!
Bronze Sponsor: £250 +
- Your company logo on our t-shirts
- An album of photos of the team in America which you will be able to share
- Your logo on our America Blog website, which we'lll regularly be updating during our adventure.
- Our eternal gratitude!
Please be aware that in order to get our t-shirts printed, the deadline for getting your logo to us will be Friday 23rd May. You are welcome to sponsor us beyond this date and will still receive all the other perks mentioned above.
Can I share this in the press?
Yes please, we’d love that!
We are working on a Press Release, which will be available here soon. In the meantime there are a bunch of photos of us at both the Regional and National finals that you can use with your story.
Finally, if you want to speak to us properly please do email our teacher Mr Woolcock or ring Penpol School and he can sort that out. Interviews, quotes, soundbites – anything we can do to help spread our message and raise some money to get us to America.
Thank you for helping share our story! 🪼
Press Release
Our teacher Mr Woolcock has put together a short press release to share our story, which you can download below.
Please do get in touch with him for more details, quotes, interviews and anything else that'll help you spread our story far and wide!
Publicity Photos
Here are a selection of photos and videos from the team in action at RNAS Culdrose and Harrogate, which can be used for publicising their story and helping to raise funds for the team.
The captions on each image should give you additional context.
Get in Touch
Please use the link below to give Mr Woolcock (our teacher) an email. He can arrange interviews, quotes or anything else you might want to help promote us and help us get to America.
Have you been in the media?
Our story has been shared quite a lot in the past few days, with the whole community rallying around us and offering support. You can explore some of our recent media appearances here:
With thanks to Press Association, our story has now been picked up by media outlets across the country! Here are links to just some of them below:
"Cornwall students fundraising for ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ US Lego competition trip"
Ada, James and Ethan were interviewed (live on air!) by Julie Skentelbery to hear how their Food Waste project has earned them a place in America, as well as discussing what going to America would mean to these students.
Mr Woolcock spoke to Jamie Reed during the breakfast show to share how proud he was of the students and everything they've achieved.
- Breakfast with Jamie Reed 00:00
PirateFM have been kindly sharing our story regularly on air, encouraging people to support us through our GoFundMe page.
- Penpol on Pirate FM 00:00
Spotlight came to visit us at Penpol to learn about our Food Waste project and how we're fundraising to get to America.
Hang on, Why am I thinking about Pumpkins?
Two years ago Penpol School took part in FIRST LEGO League with a team called the Penpol Pumpkins who also found themselves in the incredible position of being invited to America for a World Final.
Whilst it was a huge mission to fundraise, practice and organise logistics in just four weeks we were able to get the students there and they competed against the very best teams in the world – bringing home a trophy for their Core Values too!
Since then the legacy of the Pumpkins has had a profound impact on our school community and beyond. They have been integral in inspiring countless students to learn to code – whether at Penpol or through the ten LEGO Spike Prime robots they donated to other schools in Cornwall after the competition.
You can read all about their American Adventure on the Pumpkin Blog here or hear from them in this reflection video we made when we got back home.
