| I'd like to encourage their achievement, but it's not clear what they achieved. > The team’s winning entry was a solar-powered robot that would help small farmers carry out tasks including seeding and cutting crops like wheat Apart from the general idea, what was created? Here's a more detailed article from the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/world/afghanistan-girls-r... > The team, which had only two weeks to build its robot for the event because a shipment of parts was delayed, won a silver medal for courageous achievement. Courageous achievement is good politics, but not necessarily good engineering. Here's an article from NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/07/22/538088825/what-re... > The winner was chosen by the thousands of spectators who attended the event. They mention what the robot actually does: > Every team arrived with a robot in tow, each built with the exact same components, but designed, engineered and programmed differently. The goal: to gobble up and sort blue and orange plastic balls representing clean water and contaminated water. > The Afghan team's consolation prize: a medal for "courageous achievement" and knowing that they placed much higher than countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and the U.S. - - - So my takeaway is that apart from facing all of the challenges that come with delayed shipments and denied VISAs, the girls managed to build a robot out of the standard parts list. Their robot was voted on by thousands of attendees, and they placed higher than teams from developed countries like Canada, the UK, and the US. What's the actual news? Not much, this is a fluff story. But it means something that a team of Afghan girls even made it to competition, much less built something that could legitimately outcompete more developed teams. |