FIRST Global Challenge Robotics Competition 2025

Panama City, Panama – 29th October to 1st November – Team Ireland has achieved an outstanding result at the 2025 FIRST Global Challenge, placing 8th in the world, the highest ever finish for Ireland. The event, held this year in Panama City, brought together the brightest young minds in robotics, engineering, and innovation to tackle real-world problems through technology and teamwork.

The FIRST Global Challenge is an international robotics competition that aims to inspire science and technology leadership and innovation among youth worldwide. Each year, FIRST Global invites every country to send a team to design and build a robot to compete. Teams collaborate to complete challenges in a game designed around solving some of the world’s biggest issues. This year’s theme focuses on biodiversity loss and the ways we can work to prevent it. The competition aims to inspire global cooperation and understanding among young people as they use their skills and creativity to tackle real-world problems.

FIRST Global Challenge Robotics Competition 2025

Representing Ireland, the team demonstrated exceptional creativity, technical skill, and collaboration throughout the competition. The 8th place finish, Ireland’s highest ever ranking, was accompanied by 2 further awards, The Video storytelling award, and The Social Media award. This high finish allowed them to advance onto the play-off stage of the competition, where only teams of the highest quality compete.

For each match, teams were grouped into alliances of 3 V 3 with alliances changing for every match. It was a test of technology and problem solving, communication across language barriers, and the ability to form new strategies each time. Although all countries started with the same kit, each resulting robot was unique – every country’s robot had its own strengths and weaknesses and this required students to collaborate continuously and adapt their strategy as they were allied with country after country – in order to optimise their success in every match.

“We’re incredibly proud of Team Ireland’s success on the world stage,” said mentor Pawel Zielinski. “This achievement reflects the team’s dedication, creativity, and collaboration over the past few months. It showcases the remarkable talent of young people in Ireland and offers great optimism for the future and what they can achieve.”

The competition not only highlighted Ireland’s growing talent in robotics and engineering but also emphasized the importance of international collaboration and STEM education for solving future challenges.

More info about FIRST Global and the World Robotics Competition:

FIRST Global is a US charity founded by inventor and innovator Dean Kamen and it strives to convince the various national governments and organizations of the world to embrace STEM education, invest in FIRST programs, and support their young adults. The aim is to nurture cross-cultural communication and cooperation among high-school students around the world through STEM. In doing so students are empowered to collectively tackle the world’s most pressing challenges and come up with solutions that improve quality of life for all. The FIRST Global Challenge is the mechanism for doing so. By bringing future STEM leaders together in an engaging and collaborative competition that drives home the importance, excitement, and applicability of STEM education, FIRST Global is using robots and technology challenges to build young adults that have the self-confidence, skill sets, imagination, courage, and vision to do important things. This year’s theme challenged FIRST Global teams of students from around the world to collaboratively innovate to maximize biodiversity and protect the incredible variety of life that sustains us all. From rainforests to coral reefs, the health of us and our planet depends on it!

The FIRST Global Robotics Challenge:

An Olympic-style, international robotics competition that takes place in a different country each year. FIRST Global invites each nation to send a team to build and program a robot to compete. All teams receive exactly the same kit and cannot add to it making the competition a fair one. During the robotic competition, teams from across the world are allied together to complete tasks in a game themed around one of the greatest challenges facing our planet. This is designed to foster understanding and cooperation among the youth of the world as they use their abilities to solve the world’s problems. In each round, each country’s team is allied with teams from two others to compete against another allied group of teams.

The allied teams are varied for each round and in this way students learn to collaborate with teams from numerous countries across the world identifying each team’s weak and strong points and strategising to produce the optimum game of play. In the 2025 Eco Equilibrium robotics challenge, student teams navigated their robots through a richly diverse, simulated world to carefully restore habitats, maintain ecological balance, and protect vulnerable species, emphasizing the delicate systems that support our planet and the critical role innovation plays in their survival. Out of 190 countries taking part, Team Ireland came 8th in the world.