Press release from the Florida Museum of Natural History
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — This weekend, over 400 elementary and middle school students carrying Lego robots will gather in Alachua, Florida, to compete in the 2025-2026 Northeast Florida First Lego League Regional Championship. Among the crowd will be last year’s winners, the Turbo GatorBots, who recently outperformed more than 30 teams at a Clay County qualifying contest. For this team, the competition is tense. It’s nerve-wracking. It’s growth-provoking. But most importantly, it’s fun.
Each year, the championship’s sponsor, First — a global nonprofit that offers an array of robotics programs for students in grades K-12 — releases a new challenge based on a real-world, scientific topic. For this year’s Unearthed theme, teams are diving into the challenges of archaeology. In preparation for the competition, more than 15 teams connected with archaeologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History to learn more about the field…