Both also serve as reminders to current team members of what’s possible if they continue pursuing STEM fields. Ismail is in his third year studying computer engineering at Queen’s, while Shanti is a freshman studying business intelligence (a combination of business and tech applications) at Al-Najah National University in the West Bank.
Dalia Nasr, 2025 Team Palestine student: The alumni, I can learn from them. There are not a lot of robotics courses in Palestine. It’s not really common for us to have these kinds of things. So it’s a really, really big opportunity for me.
Ismail: At some point, I was looking to my uppers, people that participated in previous years. The same way I’m inspiring people, other people inspired me.
Saleh: We have no words to express our feelings when the first student graduated from high school, and they started to think, “We want to be like Khalil and study computer science, or we want to actually study robotics.”
It was really rewarding to see them turning this passion into a career. The most rewarding thing for us is when they come back in summer vacation, they come to volunteer with our team to share their knowledge.
The 2025 traveling iteration of Team Palestine, five members strong (plus mentors), is just a few days from departing for Panama City. Their robot, which Nasr says is essentially finished, will collect “biodiversity units” from a tank in the playing field and shoot them into a makeshift ecosystem, simulating real-life attempts at ecological equilibrium, which is this year’s theme.
Nasr, 16, will serve as the team’s “human player,” responsible for aiding the robot in shooting the biodiversity units; she jokes she’ll lean on her limited basketball experience for a leg up.
Nasr: Being able to take part in a competition where I can inspire other Palestinian youth or other Palestinian students who are also interested in pursuing careers in STEM, this is something that’s genuinely one of the most life-changing experiences in my life. I know that this is a lot of pressure on me as a person, but also it’s a really big honor.
