Team Bangladesh emerge victorious among 174 countries

Team Bangladesh has become the champion after competing against 173 countries in the biggest global robotics competition for high school students titled "First Global Challenge", which took place from July to September.

In these three months, 10 young innovators developed life saving devices and robots, participated in different challenging events and brought glory to their country.

The members are Sujoy Mahmud (17) from Mangrove School, Razeen Ali (18) from Sir John Wilson School, Mahi Zarif (16) from International Hope School, Shahrear Shemanto (16) from DPS STS, Abrar Jawad (15) and Aymaan Rahman (15) from Bangladesh International School and College, Bianca Hassan (19) from Dhanmondi Tutorial, Zahraa Chowdhury (14) from Sunbeams, Areebah Nawar (14) from South Breeze and Fairooz Hafiz Farin (18) from Mastermind.

All of them are also students of Tech Academy -- a social enterprise that teaches children about robotics, electronics and programming to popularise science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. It mentored and supervised Team Bangladesh.

Team member Aymaan said, "For this event, I developed a robot called "Covitron-1"…which can deliver food, medicine and other necessary materials to a person who is in quarantine to prevent the spread of infection…It was highly admired and was selected as one of the top 10 projects."

To make students interested in STEM, the competition is organised every year for ninth to twelfth graders. The event is also widely known as the "Olympics of Robotics".

Completing such daunting challenges was not easy. Team member Zahraa said, "We had to work the whole day and passed many sleepless nights. The final day of submission was on my birthday, but we still worked all day and night. It was definitely a very different kind of birthday."

In 2017, the first edition of the competition was held in the United States. This year, the fourth edition was organised virtually due to the pandemic. Last year, the Bangladeshi team stood seventh.

Shams Jaber, founder of Tech Academy, said, "We want to popularise STEM education among school children to make them skilled and technologically efficient. We have a lot of brilliant students but don't have enough opportunities to utilise their potential. We just wanted such a platform where the students could flourish."