Caribbean high school students will join peers from over 190 countries in the FIRST® Global Challenge 2024, often referred to as the Robotics Olympics, held in Athens, Greece—the birthplace of the Olympics.
The nine-member team representing Jamaica arrived in Greece yesterday, ready to kick off the competition today. The delegation includes five students, two coaches, one additional student, and one additional coach. Schools represented in the 2024 team are the American International School of Kingston (AISK), Campion College, Hillel Academy, Immaculate Conception High School, Kingston College (KC), and Wolmer’s High School for Boys.
The students on the team are Alwyn Brown from KC, Ojani Chung from Campion, Emily Zhu from Hillel Academy, Abbigail Cato from Immaculate, Sean-Michael Williams from AISK, and support student Jordon Williams from Wolmer’s. The coaching staff consists of Paul Pounall and Marc-Anthony Eaton, along with junior coach Orville Daley. Dezion Duhaney serves as the chaperone for the group.
In the eastern Caribbean, a group of five students will represent Dominica at the FIRST® Global Challenge 2024. The team includes Amado Benjamin, Cadel Casimir, Christiana Walsh, Kenilee Baron, and Xaria Timothy, who hail from various secondary schools and the Dominica State College.
Led by Kodie Jean-Jacques and Odessa Dinnard, these students are recognized for their dedication in fields such as information technology, computer science, mechanical engineering, technical drawing, mathematics, physics, integrated science, biology, and chemistry.
Donavan Wilson, president of the New York-based non-profit Jamaica Union of Alumni Associations (UJAA), which sponsors the team and coaches, announced that the association successfully raised the $10,000 needed to cover all expenses for this year’s competition.
Last year, the Jamaican robotics team, which included ten members, won the prestigious Katherine Johnson Award for engineering documentation. This award is named after the African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson, known as the “human computer” for her calculations that helped guide astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepard safely back to Earth. Jamaica earned the award by demonstrating exceptional documentation of their robot-building journey, outperforming over ten other teams.
