19 May Team Cook Islands 2025 🇨🇰
We are the COCOBOTS!
We come from fifteen small islands in the heart of the Pacific, scattered across an ocean territory nearly 2 million square kilometers wide, one of the largest exclusive economic zones in the world, even though our land is tiny. Our home is 99% ocean, and that ocean is everything to us. It feeds us, protects us, defines our culture and traditions. But it’s also under threat.
Climate change is already eating away at our coastlines. Coral reefs bleach in warming seas. Stronger cyclones batter our communities. Invasive species creep in. Plastic waste drifts onto our beaches. Even though we’re small, these global problems hit us hard. That’s why this year’s FIRST Global theme, Eco-Equilibrium, speaks to us so strongly.
We’re a team of 15 students from villages all over Rarotonga, coming together from different schools with one shared goal: to learn, to grow, and to help find solutions. Some of us dream of becoming engineers in civil, biomedical, aerospace fields. Others want to be architects, marine biologists, pilots, designers, even Formula 1 engineers. We play sports, write stories, draw, game, crochet, and share ideas late into the night. Robotics gives us a way to connect all those interests into something bigger.
For us, robotics isn’t just about building machines. It’s about building ourselves. It teaches us to think critically, to work as a team, to try, fail, and try again. It gives us the tools to imagine solutions for the challenges our islands face like monitoring our marine park, Marae Moana (the world’s largest multiple- use marine protected area), protecting our biodiversity, and designing resilient infrastructure for a changing climate.
We know we’re representing one of the smallest countries at FIRST Global, but we don’t think small. We’re here to learn from other teams, to share our culture and stories, and to show that innovation and caring for our world go hand in hand.
We are the COCOBOTS and we’re proud to carry our island pride with us. See you at FIRST Global Panama City!
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