India’s 15-YO Gold Winner of International Robotics Contest & a Student-Teacher Bond Behind It

How far will a teacher go to guarantee her student’s success?

We’ll let teacher Maya Kamat’s endeavours towards her student Usha Kumawat’s robotics competition, answer this.

The months of March, April and May this year were a buzz of activity at The Progress High School in Panjim, Goa. Not just the school, but the entire town watched in awe as the teacher showed an exemplary commitment to ensuring that her student reached the international round of the Codeavour 5.0 AI Robo City Challenge — a robotics competition where school students are expected to solve real-world challenges that align with the United Nations SDGs (sustainable development goals).

By its very nature, the event challenges conventions, pushing the students to broaden their scope of thinking.

It wasn’t just Usha’s performance — she won gold in the senior category — that is inspiring, but also the circumstances amid which she managed the feat. Born into a humble family in Goa — Usha’s father is a tile fitter and her mother is a homemaker — her first foray into the fascinating world of robots started last year when her teacher Maya took the class to a robotics camp. She was hooked.

So, when the Codeavour 5.0 AI Robo City Challenge was announced in March this year, naturally, she saw it as a perfect opportunity to play to her strengths.

And she did.

In Dubai, the 15-year-old competed against 60 countries while displaying stellar control skills. Her win put India on the robotics map. The laurels are many but at the heart of them is a young girl’s desire to prove that girls can achieve anything they put their minds to.

“So what if we do not play video games? We can still be good at robotics,” she smiles. As her teacher Maya and she break down the details of this journey to success, I must agree it makes for a very vivid story.

An aspiring innovator

In March, Maya put together a team to compete in the regional round which was to be held in Goa. The team comprised Usha and two of her male classmates. Time was of the essence as the three, led by their teacher, bent their heads over a prototype. Despite oozing confidence in controlling the robot, Usha backed out on the day of the competition, letting her classmate go up on stage instead. “Boys are good at these things,” she had told her teacher at the time — a statement that she disagrees with in retrospect.

Her win at the finale shows Usha could have handled the robot just as well as any boy, or even better. While the team managed to scrape through the regional round, they decided to make more calculated decisions at the nationals in Gurugram. “I told Usha to go on stage and handle the controls,” Maya shares.

This paid off well and Usha was selected for the international round set to take place in Dubai in May. The young girl saw her win at the national round as significant. It made her face her fears, she says. “I was able to do what I had said no to in the regional round.” Once the results were in, the goal in sight was clear to both teacher and student — win gold at the international round.

The next few weeks became a test of Usha’s adeptness as she juggled piles of homework, training for the competition, other extracurricular activities at school, and the looming challenge of arranging funds for the trip. But needless to say, she excelled at this balancing act.

Letting us in on her strategy, Usha says, “I had a few days to practise. I knew I had to make the most of them.” She explains that the robot named ‘Quarky’ was designed to perform tasks within a stipulated period of time. “The competition required the robot to perform 11 tasks within five minutes. So, I set aside two hours for practice every day and would put a timer on my father’s phone to measure how long I was taking for one task. Every day I would try to reduce this time.”

The 11 challenges, she says, were designed to test the robot’s proficiency in matching colours, judging directions, navigating through a set of obstacles, segregating between items, and piecing together an order. And she delivered phenomenally!

Recalling the moment her name was announced as the winner, Usha calls it surreal. “It made me very happy to see my parents and teachers feeling so proud. They did so much to bring me to this stage and winning felt amazing.”

While the audience was cheering Usha, there was one person to whom the victory felt like a battle won.

A teacher who went beyond

From March through May, Maya has been Usha’s biggest cheerleader. The relationship was reciprocal, she maintains. “Usha is a student who listens carefully to feedback and performs accordingly. This willingness to learn helped her succeed.” While many factors blended to make Usha’s win a reality, Maya recalls the biggest challenge as arranging funds to finance Usha’s trip to Dubai, where the international round was scheduled.

“It was Saiesh Gandhi, the mentor for LegoGoa — a Goa-based organisation that trains students in STEM and programming — who guided me with the idea of crowdfunding. He explained to me that people would understand our cause better through a video that explained Usha’s family background, her interest in robotics, her dream to participate in the competition, and the financial crunch being the obstacle,” she says.

There were 20 days to the competition, and time was running out. “We decided the video was a good idea. But Usha had never faced a camera before, so we had to do multiple retakes.” The problem was exacerbated by the young girl falling ill. But Maya says her resilience to achieve her dream motivated her to oblige with all the requirements.

Yet another hurdle was the passport as Usha did not possess one. “I asked Usha to get her documents to the school the next day so we could begin the process of applying for her passport. But when I saw the documents, the details were erroneous,” Maya says. She explains, “In the school entry, Usha’s name was registered as ‘Usha Kumari’, but her birth certificate data did not match this. So we decided to apply for a corrected birth certificate. But we were met with a setback there too as we required the parents’ marriage certificate for this.”

Usha’s parents did not have a marriage certificate. Procuring the documents from the village of Guhala, Neem ka Thana, Sikar, Rajasthan, where the parents had married, would be a long-drawn hassle, they discovered.

Time was running out.

Since conjuring a marriage certificate was not an option, they decided to get a PAN card made for Usha. But first, they had to get her Aadhar Card corrected. This process along with getting Usha’s PAN card, and numerous visits to the passport office and then the visa office, occupied much of the teacher’s after-school hours.

In the bargain, her eight-year-old son Vedang — who had also aced the national round in the junior category and was preparing for the Dubai internationals — felt neglected. “Why are you helping another student succeed so much?” his innocent question shocked Maya. While he did comprehend the urgency of his mother’s work, Maya says she felt conflicted. But despite this, her commitment towards Usha’s success remained unflinching.

In May, as Vedang Anay Kamat from Saraswat Vidyalaya and Usha held their awards at the ceremony in Dubai, the proudest person was Maya. She cherished the moment, as a parent and a teacher.

The double win felt personal. Maya was also awarded ‘Champions Change Maker’ for Mentor of the Year at Codeavour 5.0. She smiles with pride as she tells this story.

Meanwhile, Usha pipes in, “My teacher’s motivation made me win.”

We agree. And for anyone who thinks girls and tech do not make for a great combination, Usha has a message for them: “Girls can do robotics. They can do anything, sometimes even better than boys.”

Edited by Pranita Bhat.