Ghana’s representatives at the 2021 FIRST Global Challenge will be 12 students from the Aburi Girls Senior High School.
This year’s edition of the robotics event will be a virtual event, and will be the fifth edition, under the theme, ‘Discover and Recover’.
It will start on September 27 and end on September 28, 2021.
The event will focus on overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic by discovering opportunities for innovative recovery and will have participants from more than 160 countries.
The STEMbees Organisation will mentor Team Ghana, which is made up of only girls.
The team from Aburi Girls will focus on making biodegradable nose masks from plantain fibres that are more comfortable and do not require strings to wear for the Solutions Challenge, in which the teams are to innovate STEM solutions to local problems resulting from the pandemic in the areas of education, environment, health, and economy.
“At STEMbees, we encourage young women to become problem solvers, using technology. The problem this team identified is that a large number of Ghanaians do not properly dispose of the single-use nose masks…,” co-founder of STEMbees, Angela Koranteng has said.
“An exciting thing about this year’s FIRST Global Challenge is the prototyping of a CubeSat. The girls are designing and building a CubeSat miniature satellite prototype and will launch it into the lower layers of Earth’s atmosphere on September 25 at their school.”
About the First Global Challenge
First Global is a US-based public charity that seeks to inspire leadership and innovation in youth from all nations by empowering them through education in STEM.
It seeks to nurture cross-cultural communication and cooperation among high school students around the world through STEM, empower them to collectively tackle the world’s most pressing challenges and come up with solutions that improve qualify life for all.
FIRST Global Challenge is set up as an olympics-style, international robotics competition that takes place in a different country each year.
The 2021 edition is for the teams to find new ways that STEM can prioritise practical solutions and counter the problems youth and their communities face. The virtual challenge is running for 12 weeks, consisting of the Solutions Challenge, the CubeSat Prototype Challenge and the Robotics Challenge.
