First Global Robotic Challenge |12 November 2021
Some members of Team Seychelles with Mr Estico (Photo: Jude Morel)
Seychelles records its
best performance yet
- Wins silver medal
Team Seychelles has outdone all of its past performances in the First Global Robotic Challenge this year, ranking 17th out of 177 countries and coming out second in the solution challenge, guaranteeing itself a silver medal.
It is the first time that the Seychelles national team brings home a medal directly related to one of the competition’s challenges, although it won a bronze medal for the Al-Khwarizmi Award for outstanding supporter in 2017.
The First Global Challenge Robotics Olympiad is a global robotics, science and technology event in which national teams from across the globes made up of schoolchildren, their mentors and leaders participate.
The recent good performance of the national team has been deemed a success story for the division of Science Technology and Innovation (DSTI), formerly the National Institute of Science, Technology and Innovation (Nisti).
“This is a great achievement. It is a serious global competition – it is just like the Olympics, almost every country participated in it. If we have been ranked 17th then most definitely we have left behind a lot of countries including UK, Canada which shows that kids in a small island developing state like ours have the skills to be able to perform to a very high standard in such global competition,” said team manager and DSTI director Xavier Estico.
He made note of this during a brief press conference with the media yesterday which was attended by some members of Team Seychelles.
Prior to this achievement, Seychelles had ranked 105th out of 163 countries in the 2017 First Global Challenge held in Washington, USA; 126th out of 161 countries in Mexico in 2018; 121st out of 161 countries in the Challenge held in Dubai in 2019 and ranked 47th out 175 countries in 2020 when the Challenge was first held remotely due to the pandemic.
This year’s ‘Discover and Recover 2021’ Olympiad was held between June 27 and June 30 with four main challenges for the national team to compete in.
The first was the solutions challenge which invited countries to come up with solutions to economic, educational, health or economic problems and it was in this category the Seychelles team excelled the most to come out second, along with alliance country Uruguay.
Team Seychelles’ concept focused on reducing the country’s reliance on hydro-carbon in favour of tidal energy.
The other challenges were the CubeSat Prototype Challenge – where teams were to design and build a prototype and launch it into the lower layers of the Earth’s atmosphere – a robotics challenge and the STEM Talks challenge.
Bonus points were also amassed through social media challenges throughout the season.
In total, Seychelles came out with 55.75 points, placing it 17th on the leader board just behind countries such as USA, India, Romania, Yemen and Madagascar but well ahead of more than 100 other countries.
The eleven students on the team were:
Tahani Malbrook (Anse Boileau secondary school)
Rebecca Samantha (Beau Vallon secondary school)
Mikhail Rudchenko (International School Seychelles)
Ronan Varsani (International School Seychelles)
Yannick Hollanda (International School Seychelles)
Wayne Lesperance (Independent School)
Sakthi Guhan Alexander (International School Seychelles)
Mitch Loze (La Retraite primary school)
Keine Banane (Perseverance secondary school)
Naveen Volcère (Mont Fleuri secondary school).
They were assisted by various mentors including Dr Ralph Etienne-Cummings from the John Hopkins University.
A prize-giving ceremony to reward Team Seychelles is expected to be held at a later point.
Elsie Pointe