Eight kids. Six schools. Coached by parents. Silver for Great Britain.
Lord of the Bricks is a FIRST LEGO League team from Croydon. Eight children. Six schools. No academy, no sponsor-built lab, no professional coaches. Two parents, a doctor and an IT architect, ran every session. In the 2025–26 Unearthed season the team became Kent Regional Champions, UK Knockout Challenge Champions, and took 2nd place in Robot Performance at both the UK Nationals and the FIRST LEGO League Korea Open in Jeonju, South Korea, representing Great Britain. Their score in Korea: 540 out of a possible 545. Along the way they built a working AI assistant for the Kent Archaeological Society. It is live today.
Regional champions for the second year running. The season’s floor, not its ceiling.
1st Place UK Knockout Challenge Champions. Then 485 out of 545 in Robot Performance. Second place. Close enough to touch first. Far enough to hurt.
This is the chapter that matters. Nobody would have blamed eight kids for banking a national silver and taking the summer off. They went back to the table instead. 200 more hours. Runs rebuilt, code rewritten, tests repeated until the failures ran out. 485 in Harrogate became 540 in Jeonju — 55 points found in under two months.
Against teams from dozens of countries: 540 out of 545. Second place, again. Same colour medal. Not the same kids.
Eight children from six schools, together every Sunday for a year. As they tell every judging room: the robot is not their best build. The team is.
Loge is a doctor. Karthicraja is an IT architect. On Sundays they are a pit crew. Every hour volunteered, every session parent-run, four years and four generations of robot.
World Dominator. Fourth generation. Designed and built by the kids, coded by the kids in Python. 27 tasks across 15 missions, compressed into 8 strategic runs of two and a half minutes.
While the robot trained for Korea, the same eight built something else: a live AI assistant for the Kent Archaeological Society. 150 years of journals and excavation records. 10,000 pages, searchable by almost no one. The assistant answers in three voices: one for archaeologists, one for students, one for the public. Prompt-engineered by the children, tested with the Society’s own curators, and open-sourced so any historical society can copy it.
Try it here: kentarchaeology.org.uk. Built with thanks to Ken, Jacob Scott and Andy Ward.
Two silvers. The gap between 485 and 540 was 200 hours of work. The gap between 540 and 545 is next season’s fuel. Resilience never came from a poster or an assembly. It came from a scoreboard, a long flight home, and a decision to go back to the table.
The award ceremony in full: the announcement, the walk up, the medals, the Union Jack. Fifty-five seconds, sound on.
The 800+ hours we spent together were filled with researching, designing, debating, coding, testing, and pushing ourselves to the edge of perfection.Loge and Karthicraja · Coaches
Eight children watched 485 go up on the scoreboard, flew eleven hours home, and asked one question: when is the next practice? You cannot teach that in an assembly. You build it, Sunday by Sunday.Loge · Coach
We treated 485 like an engineering problem, not a disappointment. Every mission root-caused, every run rebuilt, every fix tested until the failures ran out. Fifty-five points in eight weeks — and the children did the engineering.Karthicraja · Coach
Fifty Sundays, six schools, one table. Long before the medal in Jeonju, the win was already in the room.Anis · Parent mentor
Every Sunday drive, every late night, every rebuilt run — they never once asked whether it was worth it. The silver answered a question the children had stopped asking.Ashma · Parent mentor
The 2026–27 season will be the last in FIRST LEGO League’s near thirty-year history. Lord of the Bricks will be there for the final chapter.
Organisations that want to back it:
Interviews with the team, coaches and parents. Broadcast-quality video and hi-res photography available.
Mohamed Anis · anis@stepup.one · +44 7795 642256
All use of children’s names and images has written parental consent on file.