Dublin City University to Host 2025 FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge InterVarsity Hackathon
FIRST® is an acronym for ‘For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology’. The FIRST® LEGO® League inspires children to think like scientists and engineers, developing solutions to real-world problems. This science and technology challenge combines life skills and robotics, with teams building a robot to complete missions and creating an innovative solution to a real-world issue. The SUBMERGED℠ challenge asks teams to use LEGO® robotics and computational thinking to design prototypes tackling underwater issues such as marine conservation, deep-sea exploration, and underwater robotics. DCU’s Faculty of Engineering and Computing adapted this for undergraduate and postgraduate teams, giving them just 24 hours to complete the challenge.
This 24-hour Hackathon will take place on March 21st and 22nd at Polaris, the brand-new state-of-the-art building at DCU’s Glasnevin Campus, and is expected to welcome 20 teams, made up of 125 undergraduate and postgraduate students from various national and international colleges and universities. In this edition, teams from Wuhan University, Rutgers University, Dunboyne College of Further Education and Drogheda Institute of Further Education will compete with teams from DCU. Participants will work collaboratively across disciplines to design and develop an autonomous robot using the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Prime Set.
At the end of the 24-hour development period, teams will present their robots in a competition judged according to the FIRST® LEGO® League Rubrics. The competition stage will begin at 1:00 PM on Saturday, 22nd March, where teams will have the opportunity to present their Innovation Project and Robot Design, followed by a Q&A session with the judges and a Final Share and Feedback stage.
The event will culminate in an awards ceremony, recognising the Overall Champions and the winners of the Robot Competition Game, whose prizes will be sponsored by Intel and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). There will also be recognition for contributions across three key categories: Innovation Project, Robot Design, and Core Values, whose prizes will be sponsored by DCU and CreativeHUT.
The 2025 FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge International Hackathon is proudly sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), CreativeHUT and Intel. It will be hosted by the Faculty of Engineering and Computing at DCU, together with DCU Engineering Society, reinforcing a shared commitment to fostering innovation and technological advancement among the next generation of engineers and problem-solvers.
Supported by the Research Ireland Discover Programme, FIRST® LEGO® League is organised by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in partnership with Irish delivery partner, Creative Hut.
For more information or media enquiries, please contact:
mediaqueries@dcu.ie