Hey! Ho! Lego!

Gone are the days when Lego was there simply to build a square house, with a square garden and a square car outside.

Nope, these days, pretty much anything grows when it comes to Lego – and that includes making the planet a healthier place.

When a bunch of kids from the Wicklow Montessori Primary School put their tiny heads and big brains together for this year’s First Lego League World Championship, they came up with an ingenious robotic hydrodynamics solution to all that wasted, confiscated water at airports.

Just don’t ask us exactly how it works.

Suffice to say, all that water that would otherwise go to waste can suddenly power water plants, wash aeroplanes or, after a little filter magic, become clean drinking water again.

It was a genius enough idea for Mya Neiland, Hugo Sloan-Kelly, Kiah Savage, Cillian Findlay-Byrne, Anna Mooney, James Grant, Senan Sloan-Kelly and Lucy McCann to find themselves winning the Ireland/UK finals in Bristol. And now, later this month, they’re heading to the world finals, in Detroit. Boom!

We caught up with Greystones girl Lucy and her mum, Ali, down at the harbour this morning, to talk hydrodynamics, the coming robot apocalypse, heading to Motor City, and the difficulty of having a conversation when there are eejit dogs nearby…