Despite the known challenges for Christians in Nigeria, especially in certain regions, there is much great news for the country. Catholic school students are standing shoulders above the rest in international competitions.
Two Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Onitsha, the native diocese of Cardinal Francis Arinze, recently, at different levels of international secondary school competitions, shone like stars.
Encouraging the Catholic schools’ performance, Archbishop of Onitsha, Valerian Okeke, and his team of collaborators in education, say they are “grateful to God for these victories.” They congratulate the students and their tutors for their hard work and successful performances.
At the last World Technovation Challenge Competition, an annual world competition, in the United States, six students of Regina Pacis Model Secondary School, Onitsha, were the overall winners.
Technovation, designed for young girls between the ages of 10 and 18, is an initiative “that equips them with skills to solve real-world problems by means of technology, and helps them become tech entrepreneurs and leaders who can discern their community challenges and then create a mobile app solution to meet these challenges.”
The Catholic school had earlier won the competition at the national level and then proceeded to the international level that brought together students from different parts of the world. Over 115 countries participated in the competition, but only 12 teams from all over the world were selected as finalists for the pitch in San Francisco.
Developing the mobile application called the FD-Detector “to help tackle the challenge of fake pharmaceutical products in Nigeria and beyond,” the young Nigerian female students of Regina Pacis won.
Moreover, they also applied the robotics and coding insights in solving existential problem of fake drugs.
Four students from another Catholic school in Onitsha Archdiocese, St. John’s Science and Technical College, Alor, won the bronze medal in the just concluded International Festival of Engineering, Sciences and Technology (I-FEST) competition in Tunisia.
I-FEST, a nine-day-festival organized by the Tunisian Association for the future of Science and Technology (ATAST), is open for all students and supervisors, ages 14-24, as well as for parents and professors.
They were given this award for their brainchild known as Toroidal transformer, which according to them, was an improvement on other devices of electrical inverters and transformers already in the market.
Catholics in and from Nigeria express much joy for this good news, noting it is an even greater encouragement for the Catholic Church’s engagement in primary and secondary education in Nigeria.
