AJHS BluBLOC wins Think Award at World Robot Olympiad Korea 2026!

The AJHS BluBLOC Varsity Team has won the Think Award in the Future Innovators – Junior High School category at the recently concluded World Robot Olympiad (WRO) Korea 2026 in Cheongju, South Korea, sharing the honor with the NVAR team from Kazakhstan!

Representing the Philippines were Team Leader Sannie Pascua (10-Nelson), Daylight Ibay (9-Ishida), and Gio Nisperos (10-Page), accompanied by BluBLOC coaches Jason Arias and Joel Falgui, and BluBLOC alumnus Anton Bugaoan, now a BS Management Engineering student at Ateneo de Manila University.

The team earned the Think Award for KArIn, their culinary robot designed to introduce Filipino cuisine and culture to people experiencing it for the first time. Short for Kulinarya Artificial Intelligence and inspired by the Filipino karinderya, KArIn combines artificial intelligence and hologram technology in a project inspired by the WRO 2026 theme, “Robots Meet Culture.”

The Think Award is an achievement-based honor, similar in distinction to a Silver Award. Rather than ranking teams from first to last, WRO Korea recognizes teams that reach a prescribed points threshold and demonstrate strong engineering design, logical problem-solving, and structured technical implementation. BluBLOC and NVAR therefore earned the same level of recognition based on their performance.

The award marks another major milestone for BluBLOC, which earned its highest-ever finish at the Philippine Robotics Olympiad last June by placing fourth and qualifying for WRO Korea.

Congratulations, BluBLOC! The Ateneo community is incredibly proud of you!