SPISE Students Benefit from Four-Week Programme

Nineteen students of the Student Programme for Innovation in Science and Engineering (SPISE), including the Central Bank of Barbados-sponsored Jonathan Farnum, demonstrated what four weeks of dedication and hard work can produce at an all-day closing event held recently at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus’ 3Ws Pavilion.

At the event, which was attended by proud parents, past SPISE graduates, sponsors, and interested members of the public, the eager students showed off the practical and theoretical knowledge they had gained in robotics, renewable energy, entrepreneurship and computer programming, as well as Mandarin, which they learnt through the UWI’s Confucius Institute.

“The bigger goal of SPISE is to groom the next generation of science and technology leaders in the region,” Dr. Dinah Sah, the programme director explained in her welcome remarks.

Her sentiments were echoed by Professor Cardinal Warde, a prominent Barbadian physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who serves as Faculty Director for SPISE. “The idea is that the students should learn the fundamentals really well and focus on understanding the fundamentals, because if you’ve got the fundamentals you can go off to use that to solve problems that you have never seen before”.

The students entertained the audience with a Mandarin dance performance which featured the young ladies beautifully attired in traditional Chinese dress as the young men sang a popular Chinese song entitled “Little Apple”.

The highlight of the event, however, was the presentation of the final projects. The students, who had been divided into small groups and assigned the task of either building an underwater robot that could flexibly manoeuvre itself and retrieve items or of designing wind turbine blades that produce a specific amount of electricity, displayed the results of their efforts. The audience was clearly impressed by what the budding scientists and engineers were able to accomplish.

SPISE is a four-week residential programme targeted at senior secondary-level students from throughout the region who show a high aptitude for STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It provides those students with the opportunity to gain university level experience in a variation of courses, from Physics to Caribbean Unity. The 2016 scholars were selected from across the Caribbean: Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and Martinique.

SPISE was modelled after MIT’s MITES (Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science) programme of which Warde also serves as Faculty Director.

2016-08-18

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