Dr Safeeya Mo­hammed

guardian.wemagazine@gmail.com

The Holy Name Con­vent (HNC) Ro­bot­ics Team made their school proud when they won the Ris­ing Stars award at the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed “First Lego League Su­per­pow­ered Com­pe­ti­tion”. The over­all win­ners of the com­pe­ti­tion were Trin­i­ty Col­lege, but not even this could damp­en the spir­its of the HNC young ladies who were the high­est plac­ing girls’ team in the com­pe­ti­tion–third over­all–and win­ning an award for the team to watch in the fu­ture.

“The school’s first ro­bot­ics team emerged in 2018 when In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy (IT) teacher Mr An­dre Charles in­vit­ed stu­dents to get in­volved in a pro­gramme spear­head­ed by First Lego League, an in­ter­na­tion­al part­ner­ship of com­pa­nies, foun­da­tions, and min­istries geared to­wards en­gag­ing young peo­ple in lead­er­ship and in­no­va­tion in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy,” Lisette Khan, prin­ci­pal of Holy Name Con­vent Port-of-Spain said.

This year a group of rough­ly eight vol­un­teers re­searched the theme cho­sen by the event or­gan­is­ers, ef­fec­tive en­er­gy pro­duc­tion use and con­ser­va­tion, and then de­vised and ex­e­cut­ed the project.

They re­ceived a cus­tom-de­signed Lego field with mul­ti­ple manda­to­ry tasks. Their job was to build and pro­gramme a ro­bot to com­plete the set tasks ef­fi­cient­ly and au­tonomous­ly in two min­utes and 30 sec­onds.

The ac­tiv­i­ties were geared at in­cul­cat­ing a pas­sion for sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, en­gi­neer­ing, and math­e­mat­ics (STEM).

“It is vi­tal that young women see them­selves as in­no­va­tors and cre­ators and de­vel­op the req­ui­site crit­i­cal think­ing and prob­lem-solv­ing skills need­ed for ad­vance­ment in this in­for­ma­tion age. Our girls’ in­volve­ment in the ro­bot­ics club is aligned with the school’s vi­sion of pro­duc­ing em­pow­ered women ready to take up lead­er­ship in this 21st cen­tu­ry of rapid change,” Khan em­pha­sised.

Girls al­so bring a spe­cial en­er­gy to the STEM fields and ro­bot­ics, in par­tic­u­lar, their IT teacher, Mr Charles, shared.

“Girls of­ten take time to add flair and style to their work which is not al­ways present in pure ro­bot­ics. This tends to bring a hu­man el­e­ment to it that bridges the gap be­tween users and ma­chines.

“There is a high lev­el of grat­i­fi­ca­tion that comes from pro­gram­ming and the girls are al­ways proud of their ro­bot, to the point they re­fer to the ro­bots by name; To­by and Dim­itri.”

The suc­cess of the HNC ro­bot­ics team fol­lows the school’s suc­cess in oth­er ex­tra-cur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties such as foot­ball, crick­et, bas­ket­ball, swim­ming, and hock­ey–all ar­eas in which the young ladies have won ti­tles in the 2022-2023 aca­d­e­m­ic year. The school al­so re­cent­ly con­clud­ed its suc­cess­ful art ex­hi­bi­tion, show­cas­ing the tal­ents of its stu­dents who have re­peat­ed­ly topped the re­gion in Art and De­sign.

A beam­ing Khan al­so shared, “The ro­bot­ics team adds fur­ther va­ri­ety to the di­verse ac­tiv­i­ties of a school com­mit­ted to the holis­tic de­vel­op­ment of its stu­dents. It is hoped that these young women can mar­ry the deep spir­i­tu­al val­ues of their school with cut­ting-edge knowl­edge and skills to keep hu­man­is­ing ad­vances in sci­ence for the good of all.”