Kazakh students awarded at World Robot Olympiad

A team of students from Kazakhstan has been awarded one of 24 prizes of the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) that took place in Sochi this year, Tengrinews reports.

World Robotics Olympiad brings together young people from around the world, who first have to pass a qualifying stage. Held annually, the competition has been expanding ever since its inception in 2004.

Over the past decade WRO attracted tens of thousands of teams who learnt how to be creative, innovative and find solutions to difficult problems. The theme of this year’s WRO in Russia was "Robots and Space".

The competition took place between 21 and 23 November and attracted 379 teams from 47 countries. 27 children from Kazakhstan went to Sochi for the Olympiad. The trip was organized by Nazarbaeyv Intellectual Schools autonomous educational organization.

A team from Kazakhstan’s Taldykorgan has been awarded 3rd place in Junior High age group.

Teacher Nikolay Avdiunin and his protégés – 14 year old 8th-grader Ratmir Sartbayev and 15 year-old 9th-grader Bek Talgat – created a robot prototype that can be used to rotate space stations in space. This is needed to place the light sensors in the correct position for obtaining solar energy.

"The robot has six light sensors. Every second, it adjusts the position of the station in space. It is based on a rapidly rotating disk. When rotating and tilting the axis of rotation of the disk, there appears an effect of a station rotation. The gyroscope effect is used - no matter how much the station weighs, it will rotate," Avdyunin said.

Earlier the team participated in a WRO in Kazakhstan very successfully. They were placed 3rd in the Kazakhstan National WRO 2014 Final.   

Their robot is 1.7 meters wide and 1 meter tall. The real robot should be more than three times bigger and its approximate weight should be around 150 pounds.

Attention of international judges at the WRO was also captured by another team with two Kazakh students. A 10th grade student of the Kazakh-Turkish lyceum Diana Karimova and an 11th grade student Olzhas Keenaya of Kazakh school came to Sochi from Petropavlovsk to join their Russian fellows from Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk. The team won a special prize in the nomination "The most hot topic project."

Called "Power of light", their project is aimed at creating a robot that will save the Earth from a collision with a comet in 2030.

"The robot paints the comet's surface white. As a result of increased exposure to sunlight the comet changes its flight path," said the couch of the team Daniar Ualiev from Petropavlovsk. He added that the kids were working on their robot with the foreign team members via the Internet.
 
Reporting by Alisher Akhmetov, writing by Dinara Urazova