'Imagine what we can do with more': How a Cook Islands team climbed to global gold

The coach of the Cook Islands robotics all-girls team, who won gold at the 2024 FIRST Global Challenge in Athens, Greece, last weekend says it's been years in the making.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students (STEM) from 193 nations gathered for the four-day event in which the Cook Islands finished 60th overall.

The Cook Islands "Cocobots" entered into a formidable alliance with China, the Republic of Moldova and Madagascar, to take out the competition in the FIRST Global Winning Alliance category.

Speaking to Ernestina Bonsu Maro on PMN Cook Islands, coach and Centre of Excellence in Information Technology (CEIT) director, Mii Nimerota, said their golden victory journey started with a pilot project with a Cook Islands youth team.

"We entered into our first global competition in 2019 and we travelled to Dubai," Nimerota said.

"We thought we'd introduce robotics through competition to excite and inspire young people to consider fields of engineering, technology, and science."

She said within six weeks their youth, who had no experience in coding, designing, and engineering, constructed a robot to compete against 192 countries, coming out 30th.

"It was a resounding success for our community, country, and for our young people.

"[We placed] 30th based on just a few weeks of hard work and effort as an after-school programme.

"If we can achieve that in six weeks... imagine what we can do with more resources, something like an integrated curriculum, we could achieve so much for more young people in the Cook Islands."

Watch the full interview via PMN Cook Islands' FB below:

They then established other programmes for ages eight to 12, including the Cook Islands' Code Avengers, which is taking on the New Zealand Code Avengers programme, to teach their youth coding, computing, and digital citizenship.

Nimerota also said they have VEX Robotics programmes, which provide robotics education kits and bundles for pre-kindergarteners to first year high schoolers.

"It was really exciting to see a huge demand from parents, children, youth, for programmes like the ones we deliver.

"It shows us that if given the opportunity our community wants to engage in these areas of science, technology, engineering, and even mathematics."

Fast forward to today, Nimerota said they took a different approach, establishing a club of 17 members, five of which made up the Cocobots team.

The Cocobots' Uleina Eraio (15), Ruby Newport (15), Evah Sosene (14), Kimiora Vogel (17) and Purotu Enoka (16), spent the past four months going over STEM assignments and engineering principles under the guidance of Nimerota and her husband, Jim Nimerota.

Prime Minister Mark Brown also commended the Cocobots:

"One thing that we set out to achieve with this club, and with our programmes, is to really open their minds and change the community's mindset around science, technology and engineering,” Mii Nimerota said.

"And prove to them that we can integrate our culture, our perspectives, into these fields and make these fields better for it.

"Engineering and creating technology solutions is better when we can integrate our perspectives, our own Cook Island's 'flavour', and integrate our culture within that process.

"I think we proved that throughout this competition. Coming [to Athens], we represented the Cook Islands in a way where we showcased our culture."