Afghan girls win European prize for solar-powered farming robot

I couldn't find any details in Reuters article, so I read the comments. Someone gave a link to Forbes, but there were no actual details about the robot either. Fortunately at least the name of the competition was given. So I went to https://robotex.ee/en/, spent some time there and found nothing. Even the "Results" link is misleading. Does anyone have any idea what these girls actually built? Even a smallest detail regarding hardware or software used in the project?

I don't think it's a fabrication.

The girls won a prize for overcoming adversity, and they arguably built a better robot than teams that didn't have much adversity to overcome. That's not nothing.

But at the same time articles like this one leave me with a feeling of pandering and head-patting.

We all like to see groups of underdogs do impressive things.

If the article were about what an outlier their robot is because it's so good, or what an outlier the team is because they pulled off a feat of engineering against all odds, then I'd be cheering along with everyone else.

But mainly the article is: "these girls faced far more adversity than most anyone else, but still managed to perform adequately."

That's something for them to be proud of personally, and for Afghanistan to be proud of nationally.

At the same time, if the competition were adjudicated in a double-blind way, would they have still beat out other teams?

There's nothing wrong in discussing whether that's a relevant question.

On another note, I'm surprised I got downvoted when adding background information to the discussion.

Well, it is a highly political topic.

And I found no article yet, with technical details, about what they technically actual accomplished. The Reuters article is especially lacking any information, except stating that they succeded technically, but faced problems at the US border before and the latter they repeated many times, not just one quote.

So it looks a bit missleading and I would not call it journalism, if there is a agenda with it. And this seems to be the case here - directed against Trump and his Afghan ban etc.policy.

I mean sure, personally I despise that as well and I am highly against restricting people from going somewhere else, just because of their origin. And the girls are definitely courageous(their captains dad was killed by a suicide bombing this year) and maybe even did an outstanding job given their bad starting conditions ... but I saw nothing convincing so far, like the article implys, that they build even remotely something like this:

"The team’s winning entry was a solar-powered robot that would help small farmers carry out tasks including seeding and cutting crops like wheat "

I read something about designing flyers, etc. for this product, which sounds more plausible - as designing an actual robot, even only with lego, who does remotely, what the quote says, is huge work and not doable with access to good education. Which they don't have. So yes, I think they deserve praise for doing something while coming from where they are, but if news imply to me they did more, than they did(and possibly could do), for political reasons, even with good intentions, you could call it propaganda. And I think this is not helping.

As then also people like me, who have lot's of sympathy for disadvantaged people at tech - and beeing a girl from Afghanistan is probably as disadvantaged as you can get, get the impression, that they mainly won their price because of being who they are and not what they did. And this is a shame, because maybe they are even technically very gifted and did outstanding. But now I mistrust the whole thing ... and possibly also the next thing I hear from high tech girls from Afghanistan ...

(edits: updadet a bit)

No need for the "think of the children"-like narrative. People just want to know more information, nowadays there's so much false and twisted info/news on the internet that's it's no surprise people are skeptical, especially if the article doesn't give much info, who are those girls, what exactly did they build etc. I'm sure if it's a real deal they will get their deserved prizing.

The point is we don't know that, because there's not that much info in the article. It's not known what is background of those girls and what did they actually build.