Students from Kazakhstan claimed victory in two off-season "FIRST Tech Challenge UK and Ireland" robotics competitions, Qazmonitor reports citing the press service of USTEM Robotics Foundation.
The high schoolers set an absolute record in the competitions after winning 19 out of 20 games with a record score and earning 3 nominations from the jury members.
The team included 12 students aged 15-17 from Almaty's leading schools - NIS of Physics and Math, BIL and Haileybury.
The first competition - "FIRST Tech Challenge - West Midlands" - was held on June 28 in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, where high schoolers won 10 out of 10 games as well as the Judges Award, which is given to the team that demonstrates the best sporting professionalism.
The second - "FIRST Tech Challenge - South East" - was held last Friday, July 1, in London. There the students won 9 out of 10 games and won first place with two awards from the jury - the Judges Award and Control Award. The event hosted the strongest teams from the UK and countries all over the world.
Bekzat Inkarov, the coach of the school robotics team of NIS Almaty PhM commented on the progress of his students that led them to victory.
"After the world championship in the USA, we worked on our mistakes and changed almost everything in the robot, developed an improved version which works much more reliably and better than the previous one, removed complicated or slow parts, and replaced them with simple and reliable mechanisms. These mechanisms are like a tank turret - they rotate 360 degrees and allow you to retrieve objects."
"Participating in this year's World Robotics Olympiad was particularly challenging because we had 21 teams from around the world competing in our category. There were many strong projects, so the team had to give their 100% to win. But we did it!"
The Kazakhstani students spent about a month assembling their robots and spending a lot of time in their schools' labs. The young inventors modeled the robot parts themselves and then implemented their projects on the school's 3D printer and laser machines.
"It was very gratifying to see how days of hard work and sleepless nights paid off. Even though the competition was only 2-3 weeks away, we had time to build a robot, prepare its documentation, write a program, and practice controlling the robot. All thanks to the coordinated teamwork of each of the participants, and their responsible attitude to their roles and tasks. We learned all this in our robotics club," said Nursultan Dzhanzakov, a student and robotics team member.
FIRST is on the list of Olympiads, recommended by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Every year FIRST organizes various competitions for children from 6 to 18 years old. Each competition differs in subject matter and complexity of tasks. The tasks are tied to real-world challenges, such as industrial automation, mining, recycling, space exploration, biomedicine, and other important topics.
Winning the championship gives students a chance to get into some of the world's leading universities.
