Leadership Under Pressure - FIRST LEGO League (FLL)

Our proud team SGPS1, at the FLL Finals 2026

The FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Challenge is a national robotics competition where teams design, build, and program a robot to complete a series of missions. Every attachment, every line of code matters a lot and our team had spent four months building and refining ours to reach competition standards.

That afternoon, I was away at a leadership training workshop. Before leaving, I gave clear instructions to both my team and the trainer to not open our team's box and to not dismantle or modify the robot or its attachments. There was still a chance for us to qualify for the Finals the next day.

That evening, I received news that we had qualified! But in the same phone call, I learned that our robot and all nine attachments had been found completely dismantled, and the thumbdrive containing our latest code was missing.

Our four months' worth of work was gone, overnight.

Despite the shock, I made a conscious decision not to dwell on how it happened or who was responsible. There was no time for that. I needed to focus on what we could do to move forward. Honestly, I'm not sure I fully understood it myself. I just knew that placing blame or being pessimistic about it wasn't going to help my team.

With my mother's help, the parts were retrieved from school. I dropped everything at enrichment class and headed home to begin rebuilding. One teammate joined remotely via Google Chat. This was a painstaking process, because we had to verify the correct Lego components over a screen, when the parts are so small. This tested every bit of our patience. We rebuilt as much as we could together before he had to leave at 11pm. I continued alone, recoding and debugging the code until 12.20am. I gave it my best because it meant a lot to me to see our team compete in the finals. And we did the next day.

Out of 83 teams, we placed 15th! On top of that, we were personally selected to present our robot to VIPs for its creative and original design. It was our school's first-ever participation in FLL!

A week later, my Principal invited me to share this experience at morning assembly and later provided a testimonial recognising my leadership, fortitude, and composure under pressure. These observations were made by Mdm Lily Liu, our Robotics CCA teacher, who had called us several times over the evening to see if I was alright.

Looking back, what I'm most proud of isn't the result. It's how we managed to stay calm and keep moving forward together as a team, even when it was hard.

Read Principal's Testimonial Here

FLL Day 2, Finals - 15th out of 83 Finalists!

After the frenzy the night before, we were finally ready for the finals. We told the judges everything we could about the robot, how we balanced precision and speed together, how we chose which missions to do, and they seemed very impressed. In the end results, we got Exceeds for everything on the robot design. During the presentation, we also talked about the virtues and values we learnt during FLL, such as perseverance, respect and self discipline. The judges were impressed by how we managed the crisis that came our way. Again, the presentation was not enough to satisfy the judges. The night before, I calculated the points of each of our runs and how long it would take and it cam in handy. These were our roles:

Leonard: Director and Right Launcher

Ethan: Right launcher Backup

Evan: Left Launcher Backup

Samhit: Left Launcher

Alden: Utility (gives us attachments)

The first run was 250 points. Not too bad, but worse than last time. The second run was better because I calculated everything and we got back to 260 points! We decided that 260 points was a good backup in case we did badly on our third run, so we made our third run a suicide run. All the speeds were set to 100%. In the end, we got 280 points, earning us 15th place out of 83 finalists in the Schools Category! I am very proud of our team and we learnt a lot about teamwork throught this experience.

FLL Day 1

We were very nervous when we stepped into One World International School. We had prepared for months, and now we were finally ready for the competition. Our presentation went well and the judges were impressed with our robot design and how we did certain missions. The only thing was that the innovation, which one of our teammates made all by himself without consulting anyone or telling us about, did not satisfy the judges. In our robot run, we got around 260 points!