A team of eight Hastings Secondary College students has finished 47th out of 108 teams from across the world in the international STEM challenge using LEGO robotics.

The high school students travelled from the NSW mid north coast town of Port Macquarie to the United States to compete in the event.

Hastings Secondary College teacher and Project Officer with the Hastings Academy of STEM Excellence, Ryland O’Connell, acknowledged that the long journey had affected the team’s equipment.

“Ideally, we needed to fit approximately 5,000 LEGO pieces into the team's suitcases without having to rebuild or redesign any of our current assemblies or attachments," Mr O’Connell said.

“The day before flying out they were repacking their carry-on luggage with LEGO and various engineering attachments.”

The four-day FIRST Championship LEGO League Challenge was held in Houston, Texas from 16-20 April and is the world championship of the competition.

Teams are judged on two aspects; one, where they build and code a LEGO robot which then has 2:30 minutes to complete a series of intricate tasks on a specialised game table.

The Baked Pickles developed a time-saver which allowed the robot’s camera to access relevant code via coloured LEGO.

“We’ve set up a colour-coding system… each part of our whole code, a segment is run depending on what colour is on the attachment,” team member Frida Aaso said.

“That really differentiates us because we don’t have to flick through different sections of code.”

However, on competition day things didn’t go to plan on the game board, with the LEGO rebuilds and troubleshooting not working as expected.

As such, the Pickles’s scores in this part of the competition were much lower than they were accustomed to achieving.

The competition’s other aspect is twofold; teams had to pitch an idea that’s new to the world and are judged on both the pitch delivery and the project concept.

Fortunately, the team performance impressed the judges in this section, having developed a safety system for ships that automatically detects when someone falls overboard.

"A camera detects them, using AI to pick up the outline of a person if they cross over a certain area on the ship, and it then releases a life jacket and emergency beacon … it will also send an alarm to the head of the ship," team member Isaac Lavis said.

A sponsorship agreement between information technology company HP and Hastings Secondary College helped the team travel to the United States to compete.