The Young Robot-Builders of Afghanistan
The odyssey of six teenage girls from a war zone to D.C.
This year at FIRST Global Challenge, a robotics competition in Washington, D.C., an international committee of judges will assess the creativity and collaboration of 163 teams from 157 nations focused on tackling the global water crisis. From Sunday through Tuesday, the teams will present robots designed to clean contaminated water, as represented in a simulation by colored balls.
One of the groups attending consists of six teenage girls from Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the border with Iran. (They will present a device that can recognize and sort balls of different colors.) These young women, who range in age from 14 to 16, know the ravages of water crises firsthand. Indeed, Afghanistan
