In Antigua, Adventist Students Win International Agriculture Challenge

A team of students from the Antigua Seventh-day Adventist School recently won the Bright Hack Agriculture Challenge, securing a spot on Team Antigua and Barbuda for the 2024 FIRST Global Challenge to be held in Athens, Greece, in September.

Hackathons are unique competitive events that foster rapid innovation and collaborative engineering to address community challenges, Melecia Campbell-Edwards, principal of the Antigua Seventh-day Adventist School, explained. The competitive events provide excellent networking opportunities, a chance to learn new skills, and make new friends with similar interests.

High schoolers RivéYea Brown and Lemario Clarke-Damier, team leaders, along with deputy members Reanna Christopher and Ajani Edwards, are no strangers to competitions, as they won the BRIGHT Hack Fintech Challenge in 2023, Campbell- Edwards said.

“The competition required students to develop a business model to enhance food infrastructure on small islands,” team leader Brown said. The details of the competition were revealed on a Friday afternoon, and students were given 24 hours, until 11:59 PM the next night (Saturday), to submit a PowerPoint slide presentation. “We started working on the project Saturday night after sunset and completed it in four hours, submitting our presentation at 11:26 PM,” Brown explained.

The presentation displayed their company, Green Wise, a dual-purpose business model featuring a credit union offering loans and crop insurance to farmers, along with an app facilitating the buying, selling, storing, and transporting of farm produce. Clarke-Damier remarked that the competition deepened their understanding of agricultural challenges in Antigua and Barbuda and spurred on innovative solutions.

The way the competition is structured allows teams to think of ideas and make decisions very quickly — problem-solving skills critical for 21st-century learning, Campbell-Edwards said. “Our students had only a few hours to prepare and submit their entry, and determined to do their best work, given the time constraint, and God rewarded their efforts.”

The effort underscored the students’ commitment, especially given their observance of the seventh-day Sabbath, Campbell-Edwards said. “I am extremely proud of the accomplishments of our young people,” she said. “We are blessed to have students who are innovative and creative thinkers; students who are not deterred by challenges, but instead willingly embrace them. They find delight in collaborating with their peers in accomplishing common goals.”

The Green Wise team was congratulated for not only representing their school but also the entire Adventist community, Campbell-Edwards said.

The five-minute presentation impressed the vice principal of the University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus in Antigua, who invited the team to a conference at the campus in July.

In congratulating the team, Eulalie Semper, education director of the Adventist Church’s South Leeward Conference, said that “for us at the school, it is a great moment. The team has shown that we can do more than just religious instructions, because we have extraordinarily brilliant people who can design and think innovatively to meet the needs of the world.”

Green Wise will have an opportunity to be part of Team Antigua and Barbuda as they compete at FIRST Global Challenge with robots built under the theme “Feeding the Future” against teams from more than 190 countries, September 26-29 in Athens, Greece.

“We are, indeed, very proud!” Semper said. She noted that for more than 90 years, Adventist education has been present in Antigua. “We are happy that Adventist Education promotes the values of Christian education in the community in each of its activities.”

The Antigua Seventh-day Adventist School is one of two secondary schools in the South Leeward Conference. The conference also operates three primary schools to cater to the more than 10,600 church members in the region.

The original version of this story was posted on the Inter-American Division news site.