A team of 9 Ghanian girls have emerged winners of the senior category at the 2019 Robofest World Championship in Michigan, United States.
Named Team Acrobot, the team built a robot that arranges boxes according to a binary number they were given during the competition. With this, they were able to claim the top position, edging 25 other teams from several countries such as Mexico, Egypt, South Korea as well as the host team from the United States.
The Acrobot team consists of 9 girls from the Methodist Girls’ High School in Akuapim-Mamfe in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The team was led into the competition by Dr Yaw Okraku-Yirenkyi, founding member of the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation and Country representative of the World Robot Olympiad.
The team from Ghana dominated the 10 broad and challenging categories of the championship including; Game (Complete Robotic Missions), Exhibition (Showoff Projects), Vision Centric Challenge (Develop Robots to Solve Using Cameras), Unknown Mission Challenge (Surprise Missions), RoboArts (Robotics Music, Dance and Arts Competition), Bottle Sumo (Pushing Bottle or opponents off a table) and a RoboParade (Parade of Robots).
“The achievement is more inspiring coming two years after the school also picked awards at the Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE) World Cup in Odessa, Ukraine. It is my desire to see Mamfe Girls chalk more feats and urge other schools in the country to take a cue from these achievements and work hard to develop their talent through such innovational school projects.”
Jerry John Rawlings, Former President, Ghana.
Interestingly, Team Acrobot was not the only team that represented Ghana. The West African country was also represented by a junior team called Team Cosmic Intellect. Consisting of five boys, the team came from the Mikrobot Academy in Ghana and emerged 6th out of the 52 teams represented for that category.
The two representing teams emerged from the Robotics Inspired Science Education (RISE) competition organised by the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation (GRAF) earlier this year. Here also, they did battle and emerged victorious in order to qualify for Robofest World Championship.
About Robofest World Championship
The Robofest World Championship is organized by Lawrence Technological University and has been taking place since 1999.
The competition is geared at offering students the opportunity to master principles of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) as well as Computer Science (CS). All these while helping them build their communication, critical thinking, teamwork, and problem solving skills while designing, constructing, and programming robots.
Since inception, over 25,000 students have competed from 14 U.S. States, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, England, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Lebanon, Macau, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea.
The teams compete in the junior, senior and college divisions.
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