B.H.S. Hosts Fourth Robotics Competition

Belize High School held its fourth robotics competition at its compound in Belize City. This year’s competition saw the participation of seven teams that were tasked with various degrees of challenges. Preparations for this competition have been ongoing for months. Today, these high school students finally got a chance to show off their robotic skills. News Five’s Paul Lopez stopped in at B.H.S. and he filed the following report.

Paul Lopez, Reporting

Belize High School held its fourth robotics competition on Friday. The competition saw the participation of seven teams. The New Hope High School team from Orange Walk Town was the only visiting team that competed this year. The other six teams were made up of students from Belize High School. We spoke with Seny Correa, New Hope High School’s I.T. Teacher.

Seny Correa

Seny Correa, I.T. Teacher, New Hope High School

 “I feel excited and I feel that all the hard work paid off because it was definitely days and working hard, and after school hours with the students. And also late hours in the night and trying to see how the code works. So we are very excited. I am very excited about this opportunity.”

Paul Lopez

“Your program at the school, how long has it been running?”

Seny Correa

“This program that we have at New Hope High School is an elective, robotic class. We are planning to further it more and get more students involved as well.”

Paul Lopez

“So when you heard the call from B.H.S. what were your thoughts?”

Seny Correa

“My thoughts were let’s get it. Let’s participate and whatever the outcome is we are ready to embrace the challenge and this is like a warm up. Next time we plan to come again and get better.”

Belize High School sent out a call and New Hope High School was the only school to respond to that call this year. We spoke with Jamie Usher, the Principal of Belize High School about the robotics program at B.H.S.

Jaime Usher

Jaime Usher, Principal, Belize High School

“B.H.S. has always had an integration of technology. So, from twenty ten when we started we were the first school to require laptops as part of our book list. So, robotics really fell in naturally. We have been blessed with an excellent IT cohort of teachers. We have a IT Director in Mr. Sosa that has been able to keep up with this trend of robotics that have really exploded over the years, and even more so over COVID. We are very pleased in what robotics has to offer. It is a gender neutralizing sport. That is how we want to look at it. We want to look that it is girls and boys able to compete in their minds and in their logical thinking, but come together to collaborate. So, within the teams of FIRST that is a competition we do. FIRST stand for ‘For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology’.”

Godfrey Sosa, the I.T. Director at Belize High School, and his team of IT teachers are the masterminds behind this robotics competition. Sosa told us that he wishes to see more schools incorporate robotics into their curriculum.

Godfrey Sosa

Godfrey Sosa, I.T. Director, Belize High School

“People always use the terminology that we have kids of this day and age are products of the digital age. So, a lot of these things they are interacting with in terms of the software, the application, the robot, a lot of it come as an innate ability to them. What we do is just to try to develop that into more logic, into more application so that they can then be able to carry out tasks such as these.”

Paul Lopez

“What are your initial thoughts after seeing New Hope first round, as the only outside team for this year’s competition?”

Godfrey Sosa

“Well, I am excited. I am hoping that as we progress and move through the years that it does catches on to other schools. It is something we can make even bigger and better. We have support of the business community out there, such as Fultec, GS.com, V.I.P Wireless, and Cellular World, they have all come on board offering fabulous prices for this competition.”

Reporting for News Five I am Paul Lopez.

Team Mercury, a team made up of students from Belize High School came out on top of today’s completion.