For the entirety of the past year, as the teenage roboticists of Team Palestine have been working on their latest project, their homeland has been engulfed in Israel's war with Hamas. Earlier this month, that all changed. With a fragile ceasefire in place, Israeli forces began to pull back from parts of Gaza, and the teens put the final touches on the project they hope will bring them victory: a robot that can maneuver through a series of simulated challenges based on the effects of climate change.
Next week, five of the dozens of students on Team Palestine will travel to Panama City for the ninth annual FIRST Global Challenge, where they will compete alongside students from nearly 200 nations. They’ll partner with some, compete against others in a series of matches, and at the end of the three-day event, they hope, walk away with robotics gold. Their aim is not just to succeed at the competition, as they have in several recent years, but also to represent Palestine and increase awareness of—and access to—robotics and other STEM programs for their peers back home. What follows is the story of how they did it.
Khalil DarOmar and Sara Saleh, a husband-and-wife duo from Ramallah in the West Bank, founded the Palestinian FIRST team in 2018. Saleh was working as a sales representative for a logistics and distribution company after recently graduating from Palestine Technical University; DarOmar was a programming freelancer who had studied computer science at Al-Quds University.
Sara Saleh, Team Palestine cofounder: When we founded the team, we had zero experience.
Khalil DarOmar, Team Palestine cofounder: I saw the FIRST Global Challenge, and I said, “Why are we not in this? We need to be there. We need to represent Palestine in this competition.”
Saleh: We were so young to start a company or a nonprofit organization. But we had our passion.
Early on, Saleh and DarOmar found their students through local municipalities, relatives, and personal connections. By their second year they had also begun announcing training programs in Ramallah to recruit new team members interested in STEM. They would hold training sessions in their own homes or in local municipality spaces for the first several years.
Things did not go smoothly that first year. Shipment restrictions due to Israeli military control over Palestine prevented Team Palestine from receiving their FIRST Challenge robotics kit in advance for the first several years they participated, forcing them to find workarounds.