Team Nigeria Emerge Victorious At 2017 FIRST Global Robotics Olympiad

Recently updated on September 5th, 2020 at 09:02 pm

A team of seven students, who represented Nigeria (Team Nigeria) in the maiden edition of the FIRST Global Robotics Olympiad (GRO) in Washington DC, U.S. have emerged victorious with their impressive performance.

The team sponsored by Faysal Jarmakani came third out of 41 African countries that participated in the competition and ranked 25th out of 162 countries. They also got two other awards.

FIRST is the acronym of ‘For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology’ and the goal of the competition is to expose students to collaborate on techniques to solve global problems.

Amongst the other 2 awards, Team Nigeria won the 2017 Sofia Kovalevskaya Award for International Journey

Awarded to teams that documented and shared their FIRST Global experience with the rest of the FIRST Global community

Gold: Team Nigeria
Silver: France
Bronze: Madagascar

The other award, the Al-Khwarizmi Award, Silver Medal for Outstanding Supporter, was given to Omar and Faysal Jarmakani for their support and dedication in achieving the journey of Team Nigeria.

FIRST Global Robotics Olympiad (www.first.global) caps off the three-day robotics competition that saw one high-school team from each of the nearly 160 participating nations compete to address one of the world’s most pressing issues – water security. Accomplished inventor, Dean Kamen founded FIRST Global with the mission to inspire an interest in science and technology development among the 2 billion youth of the world and ensuring that every child has the chance to obtain necessary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills to overcome the greatest challenges our world faces.

The games – aimed at addressing water security – concluded with the Award Ceremony, during which teams were awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals in ten categories – both qualitative and quantitative in nature – highlighting the qualities that FIRST Global aims to inspire in the STEM leaders of tomorrow. The winners (listed below) were selected by an international panel of judges comprised of members of the STEM community who have been part of the FIRST Global Challenge experience from the beginning.