Everything started a couple of years ago, when a small group of enthusiast explored new ways of bringing together high school students from different national curricula*, which team's name Spirit of the United Neretva with official number 3368, is based on.

They have started with a simple hypothesis that science and technology are based on the same rules and principles in every language and in every school program so that they can be the tools for erasing differences and building tolerance in Mostar but, they did not expect certain problems.

Low interest in science, “we can not do it “attitude, inability to transfer theory into practice and general lack of desire to work with students from other schools i.e. other national curricula.

Team basically started from the scratch -gathering members, teaching basics, involving mentors from different schools… Suddenly something happened. We can not really be sure did the change happen spontaneously because students realized that thy are not so different or did it rise from simple desire to prove them selves or was it created from pure enthusiasm and sudden realization that they can create something new and fascinating from something completely ordinary - to tell the truth – we did not care. Suddenly we found our selves in exhausting preparations for the competition. When you do not have money or equipment or experiences than you have to be creative – so creative we were!

Sometimes we worked till 5 AM trying to find solutions for our problems, trying to find new innovative way of using ordinary stuff (like cardboard or wood) but – everybody was thrilled!!! Suddenly it did not matter who you are as long as you had a good idea, and those ideas were accompanied by great team work. We did not want just to go to the competition we wanted to prove that we belong there and - we did.

For three years now we are having workshops and we are going to the regional robotics competitions. So far we have four medals and strong desire to have them more. All our success was greatly covered by local and state media; we were highlighted as one of the greatest examples of educational excellence, but... Headlines brought us attention but they did not get us the funding, and with more and more students willing to cooperate our needs are bigger and bigger. In the time of crises we really need your help!

*As a result of divided town we still have two high schools for, let us say, electrical engineering and programming - in one classes are based on Croatian national curricula, and in the other on Federal national curricula.

Team members(black T-shirts) with team from Israel

Working on the robot

Spirit of the United Neretva (FIRST Team from Mostar)

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