Three girls to represent Grenada at International Robotics Competition in Greece

A 3 member girls’ team is all set to represent Grenada at the First Global Challenge International Robotics Competition in Athens, Greece. This is the first all-girls team for Grenada, underscoring the nation’s commitment to promoting gender diversity in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields.

The three-member team who will be heading to Greece is expected to leave the island nation on 23^rd September 2024. The members that will be participating in the competition includes, Eva Chouk, Emma Chouk and Eloise Gooding.

All the three girls have expressed their excitement to represent their nation on an international platform and stated that their participation in Greece would open more opportunities for them in future.

The FIRST Global Challenge is an Olympics-style global robotics competition that takes place in a different country every year. This competition invites each nation to send a team to build and program a robot to compete.

And, this time the competition will take place in Athens, Greece from 26^th to 29^th September 2024 where students from 190+ nations will unite together to participate in this competition.

The theme set for the First Global Challenge International Robotics Competition 2024 is Feeding the Future. This year’s theme challenges FIRST Global teams of students from all over the world to learn about and address the challenges and opportunities to provide the global population with equitable, safe, nutritious, and environmentally responsible food.

While shedding light on the theme of the event, the Assistant Mentor of the Grenada Team Robotics, Jermaine Burke stated that this theme entails in providing a sustainable development and sustainable access to food and food security.

He added that whenever he look at the world today, he notices that food security is not a very prevalent thing in a lot of countries, whether it be first world countries or third world countries or small island developing states such as here in the Grenada and in the Carriaocu as well.

He continued to say that the theme “Feeding the Future” aims at solving real world problems by simplifying it to its core roots and using robotics and mechanics to enhance or simplify these problems and make it approachable for the younger minds.

Notably, Jermaine Burke was also a part of the last year’s team who represented Grenada in Singapore. His experience with the previous team will play an instrumental role in guiding the current group.

He believes that this team has all the ability to perform better than last year. Last year, Grenada was placed in the 35^th position out of 100 participating countries in Singapore.

Burke noted that they have been preaching to the girls that consistency, reliability, and also double checking is most crucial in order to ensure that their robot functions 100%. While recalling his last experience, he stated that one of their faults, last year was the pressure they had due to the unavailability of some of the team members.

“We had a couple matches where we’d have done great, but we had to sacrifice our position in terms of point scoring to actually make it to the final stages or the final rounds of the individual matches where we would have the wheels of the robot falling off or certain aspects of certain features of the bot not being able to, work efficiently or correctly,” noted Jermaine Burke.

Therefore, he added that this team has the potential to do much better and is optimistic that the robot will function 100%.