VOA常速英语:157个国家的青少年机器人竞赛

It’s part soccer match, part science exhibit, part United Nations,the first global challenge brought high schoolers from nearly 160 countries to Washington.

They build robots to sort blue balls from orange ones and deliver them to different parts to the plain field.

“But the spirit of a friendly International competition, it’s like a robot Olympics but better.” says founder Dean Karen.

The sports in the Olympics aren’t the sports that will give kids the skill sets,the vision, the courage, the technical expertise, to take on the world’s problems.

Karen said these students are learning those problem-solving skills along with the Maths,Engineering and Programming practice to be global tech leaders.

But they also learn collaboration, each match is 3 on 3, teams after cooperate get the job done.

Lida Azizi is with the Afghan team.

Every team has their own character to them.I can’t say that we are good or they are good, but we are very excited and a bit nervous.

The Afghan team has extra challenges, and all girl team in a male-dominated field from a country torn by conflict,plus, their team was denied of visa twice, after an international uproar, president Donald Trump cleared them.

We got rejected twice by the United Stated Embassy, we didn’t feel defeated.We made robot here with them 2 weeks and we have our robot here.

But we saw they got one of does and we got excepted. This time’s again, it’s sink God’s hand, whatever it is in our destiny, one thing is for sure, we’ll never lose our hope.

They didn’t win the most matches; Finland did.

“But that’s never really the point,” says Dean Karen, “We’ve created the game.We are under the 60 robots who are gonna fight each other, and most of them will lose.

But every kid that design and build and sweated and worked over that robot has won.

Next year’s competition will be in Mexico City.

Steve Baragona, VOA News, Washington.