In a first, India to host World Robot Olympiad

Organised by National Council of Science Museums (NCSM) in collaboration with the India STEM Foundation (ISF), the three-day international championship that begins on Friday, will see participation by over 2000 students from 54 countries. “We have been advocating hands-on, minds-on approach to learning and I believe this competition will spread awareness about Robotics education and build an ecosystem of STEM based hands-on learning education in India. “It will be interesting to see students finding innovative ways of designing and programming autonomous robots to complete the task in lesser time,” says AS Manekar, Director General, NCSM. 

Students in the age group of 9 to 25 years, will be participating in four categories - regular category (Elementary, Junior High, Senior High), WRO football, open category and advanced robotics challenge. According to organisers, the theme ‘Rap the Scrap’ is in line with Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission. 

“We saw some great ideas in the preliminary rounds and hope to see even better solutions in the international finals. This event will be a great showcase of our future generations’ innovative thinking abilities.” A science, technology, and education event, the Olympiad brings together young minds from across the world to develop their creativity and problem solving skills through challenging and educational robotics competition. It seeks to enable real world application of core concepts of Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, to “develop innovative, critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills in students”. 

“It is a huge privilege for us to organise this competition at such a large scale. This platform is a tremendous learning ground for students and will provide numerous opportunities to them to nurture for a lifetime,” says Sudhanshu Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO, India STEM Foundation. About 245 teams from India qualified for the National Championship held at Netaji Indoor Stadium, Kolkata and 27 teams qualified for WRO International Championship in different categories.