Jamaican team takes bronze at World Robotics Olympics

Jamaica’s nine-member team to the Robotics Olympics in Athens, Greece, mined a bronze medal in the competition, which came to a close on Sunday.

The team, who return to the island today, was awarded the Dr Mae Jemison Bronze for international unity.

The award was made to the team that emulates the best qualities of FIRST Global by breaking down barriers, demonstrating gracious professionalism, and building bridges with fellow teams.

The Jamaican team also won the Social Media Challenge Award, given to teams that have participated in a majority of online social media challenges hosted throughout the season as well as the award for the best storytelling video that fulfilled the guidelines in creating an impactful team-profile video.

Overall, the Jamaican team finished 58th of the 190 countries that participated in the Robotics Olympics. The team returns to Jamaica tomorrow.

The team comprises five students, two coaches, one additional student, and one additional coach.

The schools represented on the 2024 team delegation were 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 who participated were Alwyn Brown of KC; Ojani Chung of Campion; Emily Zhu of Hillel; Abbigail Cato of Immaculate; Sean-Michael Williams of AISK; and Jordon Williams of Wolmer’s, who was the support student.

Team Jamaica Robotics has been guided for years by Head Coach Gavin Samuels, a Jamaica College alumnus, who was unable to make the trip this year.

Long-time coach Paul Pounall assisted with the team preparation but had to stay behind to deal with family matters.

FIRST Global assisted the core team with airfares and hotel costs for five main students and two coaches.

Last year, the 10-member Jamaican Robotics team won the Katherine Johnson Award for engineering documentation named for African-American Katherine Johnson, dubbed the human computer, who helped perform calculations in the field of aeronautics that helped guide the return of astronauts John Glen and Alan Shepard’s return to Earth from space.

Lester Hinds