PM visits ‘FIRST Global Challenge’ robotics event for students
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited on Saturday to the “FIRST Global Challenge,” the international competition of student robotics taking place in Greece for the first time, with national teams from 193 countries.
The competition opened Thursday at the Peace and Friendship Stadium (SEF) and will end on Sunday.
Welcoming the teams and Dean Kamen, founder of competition organizer FIRST Global, Mitsotakis said that the students attending “convey a message to us as to how to collaborate to resolve the issues of the future.”
Mitsotakis, who was accompanied by Digital Governance Deputy Minister Konstantinos Kyranakis, was briefed by Kamen on the annual event that aims to “empower the globe’s two billion young people to cooperatively solve the world’s challenges through STEM,” as the First Global site mentions. The PM and minister also had the opportunity to speak with students and see the robots they had constructed.
Students constructed their robots before arriving at the Challenge based on a kit mailed to all. For any issues, they address themselves to the Robot Hospital, where they can get repair, programming help, spare parts or tools, and charge batteries. Students are being called upon to collaborate on specific thematic units related to the greatest challenges of the planet, with this year’s theme being sustainable production of food (“Feeding the Future”).
The Greek team includes 100 students from all over Greece, and the premier expressed pleasure at having a large team and at participating in collaborative efforts with other countries on the challenges of climate change and artificial intelligence.
The annual event includes students aged 14 to 18, and is founded on the principles of the Olympic Games by Kamen’s nonprofit FIRST Global. Kamen is a renowned inventor and entrepreneur whose inventions include a portable dialysis machine, a vascular stent, the Segway Personal Transporter and the Slingshot water purifier.
The Athens event is being held in collaboration with the Ministry of Digital Governance.
[AMNA]
