Editorial note: Dart owns Compass Media, publisher of the Cayman Compass, which competes with The Caymanian Journal (TCJ). That connection is disclosed here. No Dart company has any ownership or commercial interest in TCJ.

Dart and the Kenneth B. Dart Foundation are to build a purpose-built science, technology, engineering and mathematics centre at Camana Bay, the first permanent home for the Minds Inspired education programme that has run Cayman's school robotics competitions since 2019 and fields the national team that won gold and bronze in South Korea this month.

The Central Planning Authority approved the planning application on 1 October, Dart said in a statement issued on 16 October. Construction is scheduled to begin in late 2026 and to be completed by 2028. The building will sit at the southern end of the Cayman International School campus and will contain science and robotics laboratories together with flexible spaces for hands-on learning, interactive experiences, presentations and community engagement.

The statement describes the centre as a national resource rather than a school facility. "The STEM facility at Camana Bay is not just the physical manifestation of four decades of STEM funding and programmes, it's a national resource for every student across Cayman," said Jackie Doak, director for Dart, the Dart Foundation and the Kenneth B. Dart Foundation. "Our goal is that with access to world class facilities, equipment and STEM leaders, Cayman's creative and analytical thinkers will discover that their capacity to strengthen Cayman's future may well be limitless."

Dart's statement does not give the cost of the building, its floor area or the number of students it is designed to hold.

What is being built

According to the statement, the centre will be the first physical site for Minds Inspired, which Dart describes as providing Cayman's young people with diverse STEM learning experiences. The programme has operated since 2012 without a building of its own.

The facility will feature a robotics laboratory and flexible spaces designed to support enrichment across the STEM disciplines, and Dart says it will create additional capacity to expand the programme and to develop new partnerships. Gary Gibbs, executive vice president for development at Dart, said the design had been shaped around flexibility and collaboration, with adaptable environments intended to encourage exploration and experimentation across disciplines.

"This new centre will be an inspiring and hands-on environment for students, a place to experiment, push their critical thinking and problem-solving skills and learn how science, technology, engineering and math disciplines come together for practical real-world application," Gibbs said. "We're excited to create a facility that supports that kind of dynamic learning that can spark curiosity and inspire the next generation of innovators." He added that the aim was "to create a building that not only supports how students learn today but can evolve with new technologies and approaches to education".

Cayman International School students in elementary and middle school will have the opportunity to study their STEM curriculum in some of the centre's purpose-designed spaces, the statement says. The school, which Dart developed and which is marking its 20th anniversary this year, is a fee-paying private school. The statement does not say how use of the building will be divided between the school's own classes and the programmes open to students from other schools, or whether government school pupils will use it during the school day or only through Minds Inspired events. It also gives no date for the centre taking its first students beyond the 2028 completion, and does not say whether it will open in stages as parts of the building are finished.

Four decades of funding

Dart frames the project as the latest stage of a long commitment. The Dart family and its companies have supported STEM education and workforce development initiatives for more than 40 years, the statement says. The Dart Foundation, established in 1984 by William A. and Claire T. Dart, has committed more than 30 per cent of its resources to STEM programmes since its inception. In Cayman, the statement says, that legacy extended into the development of Cayman International School. The 30 per cent figure covers the foundation's programmes as a whole since 1984; the statement does not break out what has been spent on STEM education in Cayman.

Minds Inspired was created in 2012 by Glenda McTaggart, Dart's senior manager of education programmes, who has led it since. The programme, according to Dart, has played a leading role in developing and promoting robotics in local government and private schools. Its public programme now includes the FIRST Tech Challenge and VEX IQ robotics tournaments for senior and junior students, a two-day inter-school Maths Challenge, a STEM graduation award and a community strand. The next Maths Challenge events are scheduled for November and the next inter-school robotics tournaments for February 2027, according to the programme's website.

"Cayman's robotics students have already shown the world what they are capable of," McTaggart said in the statement. "A dedicated STEM facility will help us turn that success into something even bigger, creating opportunities for more young Caymanians to innovate, collaborate and develop the skills our country will need for the future."

The South Korea result

The announcement comes a week after the Cayman Islands National Robotics Team returned from the 2026 FIRST Global Challenge, held in Incheon, South Korea, from 7 to 10 October. FIRST Global, the U.S.-based organisation that runs the annual competition, lists the Cayman Islands as a gold medallist in its Innovator Award for the New Technology Experience and as a bronze medallist in the tournament finals, where Cayman's alliance with the People's Republic of China, Turkmenistan and Türkiye finished third. Venezuela, El Salvador, Uzbekistan and the Republic of Moldova took the winning alliance gold. FIRST Global said at the close of the event that Madrid will host the 2027 challenge, the first the new centre's construction period will span.

Dart's statement puts the field at 185 countries; FIRST Global's own account of the event describes national teams from nearly 190 countries. The theme for 2026 was "Igniting Innovation", with teams asked to design robots that help reduce the impact of wildfires and support environmental resilience.

The gold medal was for a landfill fire-detection prototype. Dart said in June, when it announced the team, that the New Technology Experience project, led by Cayman International School student Daniel Branis, would address the recurring fires at the George Town landfill by improving detection and response, reducing the release of toxic fumes. The team had hoped at that stage simply to be one of ten invited to present a prototype in South Korea. FIRST Global's published results show it went further than that, taking the top award in the category.

The nine-member team was drawn from eight high schools across the islands, among them John Gray High School, Clifton Hunter High School, Layman Scott High School, Cayman Prep and High School, St. Ignatius Catholic School, Grace Christian Academy, Triple C School and Cayman International School. Students were selected on their performance in the inter-school FIRST Tech Challenge tournament earlier in the year. This was Cayman's eighth year at the competition. In 2025, in Panama, the team finished 34th of 191 national teams, which McTaggart described at the time as its best result and two places short of the finals.

The team's mentors in 2026 included Namitha Abraham, manager of project delivery at Caribbean Utilities Company, Desmond White of John Gray High School and Kyle Farrington and Cedric Worthmann of Caribbean Utilities Company, with McTaggart as team manager. Three former team members, Kieran Finch and Craig Maitlin from the 2018 squad and Teejhan Hansraj from 2022, returned to help. Besides Dart, the team's sponsors this year were listed as Aureum Re, BRAVA by Logic, Caribbean Utilities Company, Health City Cayman Islands and KPMG.

Abraham said in June that the team had, for the first time, set aside specific resources for the landfill project in order to strengthen its competitiveness on the world stage, and that Branis had been chosen to lead it "for his strong skills in research, coding and programming". McTaggart said at the same time that selection to the national team "is a significant achievement" and that the squad expected another strong showing after the Panama result.

Starting younger

The decision to give elementary and middle school pupils timetabled access to the centre follows a shift in the programme's own thinking. After the Panama competition last year, McTaggart said the programme needed to nurture innovators "even earlier than at high school age". Minds Inspired added a Junior VEX IQ Challenge for younger students in February this year, held the day before the senior FIRST Tech Challenge tournament that doubles as the national team qualifier, and the programme's calendar now lists junior and senior events for both the robotics tournaments in February 2027 and the Maths Challenge in November.

Dezira Tatum, one of the drivers on the 2025 team, described the Panama competition at the time as watching "new minds explore the different perspectives of a game based on world problems", and said she had seen her "future shine brighter than ever at FIRST Global". The 2025 delegation was drawn from nine local schools.

The 2026 challenge was built around the same approach. Under the Igniting Innovation theme, FIRST Global asked teams to design and build robots that help reduce the impact of wildfires, protect communities and support environmental resilience. The Cayman team's choice of the George Town landfill, where fires have recurred for years, gave it a local problem to work on within the global brief, and it was the prototype built for that problem rather than the team's performance in the main robot game that earned the gold.

Where it fits

The centre is a private project on private land, approved by the planning authority in the ordinary way, and the statement does not refer to any Government contribution, partnership or agreement with the Ministry of Education and Training. Government school students compete in the Minds Inspired tournaments, and the national team's 2026 roster included students from three government high schools, John Gray, Clifton Hunter and Layman Scott. Whether that participation will carry over into timetabled use of the new building, and on what terms, is a question Dart's statement leaves open.

What the statement does make clear is the sequence. The planning approval came on 1 October, a week before the team flew to Incheon. The announcement followed six days after the team's medals. Construction is to start before the end of the year, which means the first students to use the building are likely to be those now in the lower years of primary school, rather than the cohort that won in South Korea.

The site itself is already familiar ground for the programme. Cayman International School, at the heart of the Camana Bay town that Dart developed, supplied two of the nine students who travelled to Incheon this month. Placing the new laboratories at the southern end of its campus means the school's own younger pupils will be the centre's everyday users, while students from the rest of the islands will come to it for competitions, training and the enrichment programmes Dart says it intends to expand.

Dart's statement gives no detail of how those programmes will change once the building opens, beyond the general commitment to additional capacity and new partnerships. Nor does it say whether the centre will be staffed by the programme's existing team or whether new teaching and technical posts will be created. The statement is silent on both points.

For Dart, the project sits alongside a record of education spending in Cayman that the company describes as spanning four decades, from the foundation's 1984 origins to the school it opened at Camana Bay 20 years ago. For the programme McTaggart built, it is the first time in 14 years that Minds Inspired will have a door of its own, and the first time that the national team which brought home two medals from South Korea will have somewhere permanent to build the next robot.