Five students from Beverly’s Waring School – Dylan Cook, Caroline Oringer, Oliver Bock, Avery Cooper, and Juliette Hale – flew to Singapore earlier this month to compete as Team United States of America in FIRST Global, an annual robotics tournament held in a different world capital each year.
The team was joined in Singapore by Waring alums – Alma Power, Colin Keegan, Amelia Wyler, Owen Cooper, Olga Gadmer Langman, and Chris Douglas – who served as mentors to the team. The team, Wolfpack Machina, was also joined by current and former Waring parents.
Wolfpack was chosen to form the U.S. team because it won the 2023 FTC World Championship in April. The team had an amazing time representing the U.S., meeting with many of the other teams from the 191 nations present and competing in the tournament.
Waring has developed a noteworthy STEM program, complete with its own space dedicated to fostering scientific minds called the Waring Industrial Park (WIP). Thanks to support from the Head of School and parents alike, Francis Schaeffer (Waring School’s Science, Engineering, Technology Department Chair) was able to start a small STEM group in 2017 with several dedicated students to form a robotics team.
FIRST Global had many highlights for the team, but one of the most significant was their meeting with Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Though the team met several other dignitaries, this meeting was special because the team got to talk privately with the two leaders for over an hour about robotics education and their views on how to increase access to robotics in schools.
Another major highlight of the event was organizing a large donation of robotics parts to STEM-Inspires, a non-profit that has started over 35 robotics teams in Rwanda, founded by Waring alum Amelia Wyler. The students were proud to help secure about $6,000 worth of parts for this cause, including giving STEM-Inspires their own FIRST Global robot, organizing a large donation from Team Great Britain, and a donation of parts from REV Robotics.
