WASHINGTON: An international robotics competition in Washington attracted teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations. The team that drew the most attention at the FIRST Global Challenge, which ended on Tuesday, was a squad of girls from Afghanistan who were twice rejected for US visas before President Donald Trump intervened. But there were even more stories than there were teams. Here are a few:

RESULTS: Teams left with gold, silver and bronze medals in a variety of categories. The Europe team won a gold award for getting the most cumulative points over the course of the competition. Poland got silver and Armenia bronze. Finland won a gold award for winning the best win-loss record. Silver went to Singapore and bronze to India.

There were also awards for engineering design, innovation and international unity, among others. The Afghanistan team won a silver medal for “courageous achievement”. The award recognised teams that exhibited a “can-do” attitude even under difficult circumstances or when things didn’t go as planned. The gold medal in that category went to the South Sudan team and bronze to the Oman team, whose students are deaf.

GIRL POWER: Sixty per cent of the teams participating in the competition were founded, led or organised by women. Of the 830 teens participating, 209 were girls. And there were six all-girl teams, including not only the Afghan squad but also teams from the United States, Ghana, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. The team competing from Brunei was also all female, though a male member previously worked on the project.

HELP FROM MY FRIENDS: The team from Iran got some help building their robot from American students. It turns out that the competition’s kit of robot parts including wheels, brackets, sprockets, gears, pulleys and belts was not approved for shipment to Iran due to sanctions involving technology exports to the country. So the competition recruited a robotics team at George C. Marshall high school in Falls Church, Virginia, to help. Iran’s team designed the robot, and about five Marshall students built it in the United States.

The team explained on its competition webpage that “our friends in Washington made our ideas as a robot”. Because of the time difference between the countries, the three-member team and its mentor were sometimes up at midnight or 3am in Iran to talk to their collaborators.

TEAM HOPE: A group of three refugees from Syria competed as team “Refugee”, also known as team “Hope.” All three fled Syria to Lebanon three years ago because of violence in their country.

Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2017