Team Guinea-Bissau 2020 🇬🇼

Team Guinea-Bissau is comprised of seven students (five girls and two boys) from diverse backgrounds and ages, as well as 4 mentors. The students are all new to the team, we decided to include new students in order to allow more students to be part of this amazing learning experience. One of the things that connects all of them even before they knew each other is their passion for STEM and aspiration to make the world a better place using their knowledge.

Ana Luisa 16 years old, says she wants to be a petroleum engineer. Liliana 13 years old, wants to be a doctor. Maria do Carmo 14 years old, dreams of becoming a General Director of the United Nations at Guinea-Bissau. Djuco wants to be an accountant. Godinho wants to be a social scientist and an advocate for human rights. Naimo wants to be a soccer player and Claudia wants to be Doctor.

In regards to our mentors, two of them Karina Nosolini Ferreira and Jessica Pina Carvalho De Melo were also mentors of the team Guinea-Bissau last year. Our two new mentors are Atchutchi Barreto Ferreira and Holdair Lopes Ie. Karina has been empowering young girls across the country as she is a board member of the Atena Foundation and leader of the Npili project, which is a project whose objective is to empower girls and their mothers through quality education and skills training in agriculture and value chain. Jessica is a senior student in Industrial and Systems Engineer at Auburn University. She is also the Technical Outreach Community Help (TORCH) Chair of the Auburn Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (AU NSBE). She is in charge of building relationships with different high schools in the Auburn area to inspire young black children to pursue careers in STEM. She is also a mentor for aspiring Engineering students and one of her goals is to introduce STEM to all the students in Guinea-Bissau and break the gender gap that exists within the STEM fields. Atchutchi works as a Computer Engineer. He enjoys learning and teaching new programming languages to students. He motivates the team to work harder and put a lot of effort into completing all of the challenges sent by FIRST Global. Holdair was one of the students that participated in the competition last year and he just graduated from High School. He decided to be a mentor this year so he can share all the knowledge and experience he obtained from last year’s competition with the new students.

As a team, with the help of the Atena Foundation and our government officials, we are currently in the process of beginning our STEM project that will help to introduce STEM to students all over the country. The project consists of having a space dedicated specifically to science, technology, engineering, and math where any student interested in these areas can learn and express their creativity through hands-on work. Being able to participate and represent our country for the first time in the FIRST Global Challenge last year in Dubai was a life-changing experience for all of us. For most of the students, it was their first time being exposed to STEM and robotics, and for some, it was their first time traveling out of the country. We enjoyed meeting and working with people from all over the world with shared passions and goals. We are grateful for FIRST Global for allowing us to be part of an initiative that allows us to expand our knowledge in the STEM field, develop our leadership, teamwork, and creativity skills.

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