Hearing impaired Omani students win in US robotics competition

Muscat: A team of deaf Omani students has been highly commended at a global robot design contest.
The Omani students won an award for "courageous achievement" in the FIRST 2017 robotics global competition, in Washington, D.C. yesterday.
Team Oman was the only one competing whose members have hearing disabilities.
Omar Hussein of the Referee Committee said, "I can't think of another team I could be so proud of.
"As one of the judges, I saw how some of the referees were saying that despite the Omani team's disadvantage, they were doing a great job."
The founder of the competition, Dean Kamen, said, "We're all excited to have Oman... that's how it should be... so we can show that these kids are so much smarter than us and can have a better future."
The final winners in the competition were teams Europe, Poland and Armenia, respectively.
FIRST Global were hosting the world's first international robot Olympics for high school students, with one team from each of the nearly 160 participating nations. The President of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, was the guest speaker.
This year's robot theme was devised by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering — "access to clean water" — and saw the teams competing to remove contaminant particles from a simulated river during the competition.