Meet the Sandy LEGO Beachbots

The following is a guest post from peta2’s Marta.

Can a group of 11- to 14-year-olds from San Diego get people to eat less meat? The Sandy LEGO Beachbots can! The Beachbots build LEGO robots for competitions (where they sometimes give out vegan pizza), and they’ve also launched an initiative called Kids Keep the Earth Cool to persuade people to eat less meat by showing them the connection between animal agriculture and climate change.

We’re really impressed with what they’re doing and had to learn more. Check out what Brennan (one of the Beachbots) had to say:

How did the Sandy LEGO Beachbots come about, and what do you guys do?
We do First LEGO League, which is an international LEGO robotics competition. FLL involves building and programming a LEGO robot to do certain missions. These missions are based around a certain theme, and the teams competing also have to do a project on this theme and present a presentation to the judges. We have been doing this for six years now, with various team members.

Tell us about your robot design and how you incorporate veganism.
Our robot design itself isn’t really related to vegetarianism—that is our solution to this year’s project! The theme this year is climate change. Some of our team members (including me) were already vegetarians, so we decided to do our project on how vegetarianism relates to global warming.

How long have you been vegetarian? Do you have a favorite vegetarian recipe?
My sisters and I have been vegetarians since birth—our mom, the coach, is also a vegetarian. A favorite recipe? I don’t know—there are tons of great recipes out there. One of my favorites is the vegetarian lasagna my mom makes.

Do you have a recommendation for people who are not quite ready to make the full transition to vegetarianism yet?
If you aren’t ready to completely give up meat, reducing your meat consumption still has a huge effect! If you reduce your meat consumption by only six meatless days a month, it has the same affect as switching from a sedan to a hybrid vehicle.

Are there any other animal rights issues that are important to you?
I personally am opposed to the use of animals … in any way [that] harms them. There are much better ways to do things that do not involve hurting or killing the other inhabitants of this Earth!

Isn’t Brennan awesome? Check out the Web site that he and the other Sandy LEGO Beachbots made—www.kidskeeptheearthcool.org.

We love what the Beachbots are doing so much that we’re giving them a Compassionate Kids Award. As the Beachbots say, “Eating a bean burrito instead of meat helps save the world!”

Written by Marta Holmberg