Belize To Be Represented in the Inaugural Caribbean STEM Olympiads

Two Belize City High Schools will be representing the country over the weekend in the Caribbean Science Foundation’s (C.S.F.) inaugural Caribbean STEM Olympiads. C.S.F. organized the competition to help in raising the standard of STEM education in the region. The organization hopes to stimulate a greater interest in STEM among students, parents, teachers and the public through its STEM Olympiads. The competition categories are math Olympiads, computer coding games and robotics showcases. Orlando Medina, the Representative for the Caribbean Science Foundation in Belize, stopped by our office today to tell us more.

Orlando Medina

Orlando Medina, Representative, Caribbean Science Foundation Belize

“The organization, the Caribbean Science Foundation has been around I think for the past decade or so. The founder of the organization is a professor by the name of Cardinal Warde from MIT. He started this with the mere goal of trying to promote science or STEM education within the Caribbean, trying to get our students focused and excited to be involved in that kind for education, since it is the area that he feels and many of us who are proponents of this sort of approach to education it will solve the solutions we have, a lot of the global solutions we have. This competition, it was late last year the competition came around. We opened it to registration from schools. It could have even been personal. If you are an individual who is interested in science you could have registered. It was opened to different levels. We have grade levels for students twelve to fourteen, fifteen to seventeen, and then eighteen to twenty-one. So, there are three different grade levels. What we have is representation from the high school level which is Belize High School and St. Catherine’s Academy are representing Belize. We are competing against the other Caribbean countries, the English speaking Caribbean countries, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana. The competition is divided into three categories, the Math Olympiad which starts on Friday. It will be a jeopardy style competition where students are competing based on the different levels, depending on the type of questions they choose, the various areas of mathematics, Algebra, Trigonometry and pre-calculus. Then, the other level we have a coding competition which follows where students will be asked to design apps and those technological solutions to issues we have like climate change, food resources, energy resources, and stuff like that. The last section is with robotics.”