Sagicor Life Inc has extended its well wishes to the national winners of the Sagicor Visionaries Challenge, Five Rivers Secondary School. Team leader, Selina De Souza, and the supervising teacher, Jeanette Browne, went to Tampa on an all-expense paid, seven-day Stem Ambassador Programme from July 10 to 16.
While in Tampa, De Souza and Browne, along with other national winners from around the region, participated in design thinking, prototyping, and digital fabrication workshops, as well as a guided tour of the Kennedy Space Center. Their Tampa experience ended with a visit to the University of South Florida labs and the announcement of the regional winner.
This year, for the second time in a row, Five Rivers Secondary walked away as national winners of the Sagicor Visionaries Challenge with their Project Eco-Clean, a release said. The project team's main objective was to create environmentally-friendly by-products from used cooking oil, and to encourage households, schools, communities and fast food outlets to adopt this efficient method for the disposal of used cooking oil.
In 2014, Five Rivers Secondary copped the title with Cardboard Box Pellet�A Recycling Project. The project aimed to reduce Trinidad and Tobago's carbon footprint by providing an efficient alternative to the waste disposal system and to create a useful, sustainable by-product from the discarded cardboard breakfast boxes at their school.
As national winners, the team received a Caribbean Science Foundation computerised mobile science and technology centre (Vernier system); six microscience kits; GoPro cameras; Samsung smartwatches and US$1,000 for the school.
The Sagicor Visionaries Challenge is a yearly regional competition in Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, St Lucia, Tampa (Hillsborough County) and T&T. It is a collaboration between the Caribbean Examination Council and the Caribbean Science Foundation that seeks to boost institutional capacity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) in secondary schools and provide students with a practical, hands-on approach to solving some of the problems facing their communities.
The aim of the Challenge is to encourage secondary school students to develop effective, innovative and sustainable solutions to the challenges facing their communities or schools.
This corporate social responsibility initiative is intended to stimulate national awareness and excitement among students, teachers and parents as we seek to enable tomorrow's leaders to build a more sustainable Caribbean.