Kazakh school students triumph at international robotics championship

The winners of the FIRST Global Challenge robotics championship have returned from Singapore. Students from the Nazarbayev Intellectual School of Physics and Mathematics in Almaty achieved record-breaking results, outperforming competitors from 191 countries. Kazakhstan’s robotics team retained their championship title, which they previously secured in Geneva last year. The team was coached by Bekzat Inkarov.

“Last year, we already won the Grand Prix of the competition. During that time, there was uncertainty, but this year, we knew exactly what we were going to do while assembling the robot. First of all, we carefully studied the rules to identify actions that would bring us the most points. We had two weeks for preparation, therefore, we trained more than the other participants. We corrected all the minor mistakes, ensuring that nothing would go wrong as we stepped onto the global stage,” said Bekzat Inkarov, head of Technotory Laboratory at NIS PhM Almaty.

This year’s theme for the annual global robotics competition centered on the use of hydrogen as a fuel source. The school students’ task was to create robots capable of sorting hydrogen and oxygen atoms on a simulated playing field.

“There were six teams competing on the same field, and our objective was to collect as many balls as possible. We managed to gather more than other teams. Our robot sorted big balls from small ones, which saved us plenty of time. The same task was given during the national stage. We added a special filtering function to our robot, significantly enhancing our chances of success,” shared Dameli Shaimerdenova, NIS PhM Almaty student.