The Prime Optimisers Take on APOC 2025
Nina and Gabriel, representing Australia at APOC 2025 in Sydney
Home-Educated WA Students Represent Australia at International STEM Championship
Two remarkable home-educated students from Bunbury, Nina and Gabriel, recently competed at the FIRST® LEGO® League Asia Pacific Open Championship (APOC) 2025 in Sydney—representing Australia on a global stage alongside 58 teams from 22 countries.
Their journey began with a local win at the Bunbury Regional Championship, followed by a strong showing at the Australian National West Championship. After a surprise Wild Card invitation, they raced against time to prepare for APOC—facing travel hiccups, logistical challenges, and intense competition with resilience and heart.
🎉 HEWA was proud to sponsor The Prime Optimisers through our scholarship program, helping them complete their FLL Submerged season and showcase the power of home education in STEM.
Below, Nina and Gabriel share their firsthand reflections on this unforgettable experience, from robot missions and cultural exchanges to dance parties and Sydney Harbour sunsets.
Thank you so much Home Education WA, for helping us to make this possible! We are so appreciative of all your support, and we would like to share our testimonial of this STEM super charged adventure with all of you!
The Prime Optimisers Rolling Out at the FIRST® LEGO® League Asia Pacific Open Championship 2025 APOC has truly been the highlight of this semester for us, and we are still buzzing that we were able to have such an awesome end to our FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Submerged journey!
In September 2024, we decided to establish an FLL team, with three other homeschooler friends and competed at the Bunbury Regional Championship in November. After working hard as a team, we had a fulfilling day and received the Overall Champion’s Award.
We were then invited to compete at the Australian National West Championship, at Curtin University. We received the 2nd Place Innovation Project Award and the Peer Award, as well as an invitation from FIRST Australia to represent Australia at the Open Africa Championship (OAC) in Cape Town, South Africa. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to make the difficult decision to decline our invitation, and we thought that it would be the end of our FLL Submerged Journey!
Surprisingly, on the 24th of June, the two of us remaining Prime Optimisers received an email with a Wild Card invitation to represent Australia once again, in the FLL Asia Pacific Open Championship (APOC) in Sydney! We were so ecstatic and excited! While most other teams would have an average of six months to prepare, we only had one week to create and find materials for our “Science-Fair-Stall-Pit”, improve our Robot Game, re-write our Robot Design and Innovation Project scripts and try to fundraise to find sponsorship for this unexpected surprise. Although it was really challenging as we still had other commitments, and wild as we did not have much time, it was worth every bit of it!
✈️ Travel drama: after landing in Sydney on the night of the 2nd of July, we realised that two of our suitcases were nowhere to be seen on the baggage carousel. Even worse, these just happened to be our most essential suitcases containing our uniforms, gazebo and items for our ‘pit’ area, Innovation Project materials, and most importantly, our robot Orion Pax! We could only hope that our misplaced luggage would arrive in Sydney before the Robot Game day!
On the first early morning of APOC, we lined up with 58 teams and 700 other people from around the world, and signed into Macquarie University, where the Championship was held.
We headed straight to the Australian Reptile Park in buses, for an “Australian Nature Experience.” Being born and bred in Australia, we felt so proud of our unique fauna and flora. We enjoyed the good ol’ Aussie sausage sizzle prepared by the hard working Volunteers, as we gazed at the beautiful NSW hills with the pristine lakes!
Since we did not have our materials at hand, we could not set up our pit when we returned back to the university. Instead, we went tracking down our misplaced luggage. That evening, we also enjoyed learning about some of different teams and their cultures, from countries including: Brazil, China, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, Vietnam, and of course, our homeland Australia!
On Friday the 4th of July, we arrived earlier at Macquarie University to set up our pit after recovering our luggage on Thursday night.
Then we got straight into the robotic heart of FLL: an epic day of 120 Robot Game rounds!
In each of our rounds we participated we had to program our robot to get as many points as possible on the Robot Missions field.
Although we did not gain the same points as we had achieved back home (which also happened with most of the teams) we had much support from our fellow competitors. In the true spirit of coopertition, one of the teams helped us improve our Robot Game during our practice-pit sessions, cheered us on during our official rounds, and were always there for us in both our high and lows! Our neighbouring teams were also very supportive, and we wished good luck to each other before every round – even in different languages!
In between rounds, we also had a chance to meet some teams who visited our pit displays and we visited other teams’ pits. We talked about their awesome Innovation Projects, and in classic FLL fashion, we traded badges. At the end of the day, after our last round, we finally got a quick dinner break, before the Dance Party, which was a fun way to end an intensity-full day!
We woke up very early the next morning to practice our scripts again, since it was now the Judging day. We were also excited to finally meet up with our Alliance Team- each team is randomly assigned to another to compete with and help each other, which was another fellow Australian Wild Card Team! Our mission was to create and practice a new game strategy for a Robot Game that was totally different from the other ones, because we had to work together to gain points on a never-before seen rearranged version of the field, with new rules and points.
Between more rehearsals and practice-robot game sessions with our Alliance Team, we also successfully completed our 30 minute judging session for our Innovation Project and Robot Design presentations. We received wonderful feedback from the three judges in regards to our journey, the depth and research of our Innovation Project, and how our team learned programming and robotics without any professional help! It was so great to have such encouraging judges, and we really felt our mission was accomplished when it was all over!
After this super busy day, we all got into buses once again, this time with many new friends to share stories with. Our mystery ocean adventure turned out to be a Sydney Harbour Cruise! All 700 people fit onto one huge, four-storey ship, and it was truly one of the biggest highlights of APOC. We watched the sunset, gazed at the Sydney Opera House, travelled under the Harbour Bridge, had dinner under the beautiful night sky, had a ball at another dance party, and made even more new friends on this incredible three hour tour!
After three days of running on high adrenaline, all of us sleepy heads travelled back to the university. Then came the final day, with the Team Alliance Challenge Play Offs and the Closing Ceremony! After working hard in a very short period with our Wild Card Alliance Team, we got 15th place in the Alliance Rounds. It was a satisfying end to our Submerged Challenge!
During the Award Ceremony, we unexpectedly received the Peer Award, which is a nomination from other teams for the expression of Gracious Professionalism, and FIRST Core Values: Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, Teamwork, and Fun.
We were so stunned that instead walking through the red carpet to receive our trophy, we ran around the whole theatre to high five and thank as many people as we could on the way! We were so humbled with this surprise from our fellow competitors, and we felt honoured by those who voted for us. Afterwards, our APOC journey ended with photos, and farewells to the great staff and volunteers from FIRST Australia, and also the new friends we made from 22 different countries all over the world. Amongst the lessons we learned from this experience, we would like to point to the one on perseverance, and that we should never give up on our dreams, we should always keep our faith and push forward even when it seems almost impossible.
As homeschoolers, and being the smallest team in the APOC 2025 competition, we made it to the very end of the FLL Submerged Season! In addition, some of the teams there had never even heard of home education in their countries, so it was really encouraging to have the opportunity to share with them about our life as homeschoolers and how we are able do it here, in Australia!
Another lesson was that no one there was divided by politics and most of the time even by countries! We were all together as one big group of mentors, families, volunteers and students who just love STEM and hope to make the world a better place with our ideas and projects.
We already have exciting plans for the next FLL Season, and we hope to see more homeschool teams participating in the future!
We would like to thank all the homeschooling families that supported us trying to find last minute items for our pit in our wild week of preparation, and were cheering for us from afar! We especially thank all members of the Home Education WA Committee from the bottom of our spark – which is the heart for Transformers robots – for voting to sponsor us through this scholarship, and for supporting in being able to finish our FLL Submerged Season!
As Optimus Prime once said: We Do This Together! -The Prime Optimisers, Nina and Gabriel