Rinchi
TechInAfrica – The 20th edition of the World Robofest Championship was held on May 16 – 18, 2019 at the Lawrence Technological University (LTU), Southfield, Michigan. The participants of the championship came from various countries around the world, including the U.S, South Korea, Egypt, Mexico, Ghana, and dozens of others. The all-girls robotics team called Team Acrobot from Ghana emerged as the winner of the championship.
Team Acrobot consists of nine girls from the Methodist Girls’ High School in the Eastern Region of Ghana. According to face2faceafrica.com, the team dominated 10 board and challenging categories of the championship, including the Game (Complete robotic missions), Exhibition (Show off projects), Vision Centric Challenge (Develop robots to solve problems using cameras), the Unknown Mission Challenge (Surprise missions), RoboArts (Robotics music, dance, and arts competition), BottleSumo (Pushing bottle or opponents off a table), RoboParade (Parade of robots), Camps, Carnival, and WISER—a conference on STEM education through robotics.
The Ghanaian team managed to complete missions given to them successfully during the competition. They built a robot that can arrange boxes according to a binary number, which was one of the given missions by the organizers.
For your information, Team Acrobot was not the only Ghanaian team. There was another team that represented West Africa from the junior division named Team Cosmic Intellect. The team consists of five boys from Mikrobot Academy in Ghana. The team stood at 6th place out of the overall 52 teams in the division.
Both teams were selected after winning the national level of championship called the Robotics Inspired Science Education (RISE) competition, organized by the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation in January this year.
Robofest championship has been organized since 1999, offering students the opportunity to master principles of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), as well as Computer of Science, Communications, Critical Thinking, teamwork, and problem-solving.
Since its inception, more than 25,000 students have participated in the competition, including from United States, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, England, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Lebanon, Macau, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea. There are three main divisions who compete, including junior, senior, and college divisions.
Source: face2faceafrica.com
