https://face2faceafrica.com/article/all-girls-robotics-team-from-ghana-wins-world-robofest-championship-in-the-u-s
According to the pan-African media company Face 2 Face Africa, the team is comprised of nine girls from the Methodist Girls’ High School in the eastern region of the West African country.
ACROBOT beat out teams from Mexico, the United States, Egypt, South Korea, South Africa, and dozens of others in all 10 categories. The categories include the Game (Complete robotic missions), Exhibition (Show off projects), Vision Centric Challenge (Develop robots to solve problems using cameras), 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. ACROBOT also successfully built a robot and used the binary number given during the competition to have it organize boxes.
The U.S. Embassy of Ghana congratulated the girls for winning in a tweet posted on May 21. “Congratulations to Team ACROBOT. . .We are proud to partner with the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation to promote STEM education,” it wrote under a photo of the team.
The girls’ team was not the only competitors from Ghana; there was also a boys’ collective called Team Cosmic Intellect that was a participant of the contest’s junior division. The boys’ team came in sixth place among the 52 teams competing in Robofest.
The Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation was founded by Dr. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, the Ghanaian robotics engineer at NASA and the chief engineer and technical group leader for the mobility and manipulation group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is one of the lead engineers behind NASA’s Mars Rover and InSight projects.
Robofest has been organized since 1999 to offer students the opportunity to master principles of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) as well as Computer Science (CS), communication, critical thinking, teamwork, and problem solving skills while designing, constructing, and programming robots.
Since Robofest started, 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.
All registered participants received medals and personalized certificates while winners of qualifying and championship rounds received trophies.
