An all-girls robotics team from Ghana scored the top spot at the World Robofest Championship held in Southfield, Michigan.
The Acro-Bots, nine girls from Methodist Girls’ High School in the Eastern Region of Ghana who were trained at the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation, a robotics organization in Accra, competed for the senior division. They dominated the 10 most broad and demanding categories besting teams from Mexico, Egypt, South Korea, Canada, United States, Hong Kong, India, Macau and South Africa.
Team Acrobot took the lead in 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.
Not only did the girls complete their missions successfully, they also were able to build a robot that strategically arranged boxes and adhered to the binary number given to them as the event was unfolding.
The West African country also presented Team Cosmic Intellect. Composed of five boys from the Mikrobot Academy in Ghana, they competed in the junior division and came in sixth place, beating most of the 52 other competitors.
The teams qualified in January after competing in a competition organized by Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation, founded by Dr. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, one of the lead engineers behind NASA’s Mars Rover and InSight projects.
Since the creation of Robofest in 1999, more than 25,000 students have competed from all over the world to master necessary skills to excel in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and Computer Science (CS).
