While listeria outbreaks and food-safety recalls continue to fill news reports, local elementary school students have been putting their brains together to find some solutions.

The students are part of teams participating in the First Lego League Competition, an annual competition that requires students to program Lego robots to perform certain tasks. The other part of the competition involves researching a certain topic and developing an innovative solution.

This year’s project theme is food safety, and students are challenged to find ways to prevent food contamination. They will present their research and ideas, along with their Lego creations, at an annual competition Saturday at Ignacio’s recreation center.

Nine teams will compete from schools across the county, up from two in the competition’s first year, said Lexie Wallace, education director at the Durango Discovery Museum, which helps put on the program.

“There are extraordinary skills learned through the program that I don’t see offered in many other realms of life,” Wallace said. “It’s very rare that educational opportunities for kids are so fun and so addictive and really make a huge impact.”

The First Lego League, founded in 1989, is an international program designed to involve children in science and technology. This is the fourth year the competition will take place locally and is made possible in part by a $2,000 grant from the Coutts & Clark Western Foundation of Durango.

Teams from across the region were busy this week preparing for Saturday’s competition.

A team at Needham Elementary School, for example, has developed an idea to create a smartphone app that would read bar codes on food products. The app would pull up information about where the food was grown, produced or processed, as well as reviews and any recalls on the product.

The idea would be a much-needed solution for the lack of accountability and transparency in the food industry, said Linda Illsley, the owner of Linda’s Local Food Cafe, who heard about the idea from a student.

Because customers don’t know anything about their food right now, they can’t make informed decisions about what they’re buying, Illsley said.

“It’s our money, it’s our taxes, it’s our bodies, it’s our heath,” she said. “We’re not being allowed to choose because there’s no labeling. There’s nothing more sacred than the body and what you put in it.”

ecowan@durangoherald.com