A Close Finish That Taught Me More
At the national finals of a robotics competition, Abbas Raza and his team looked at some of the simpler robots around them and thought they had the advantage. Then those teams started matching their scores. They finished third, one place short of qualifying internationally. That experience changed the way he thinks
Where it started
Abbas and his team had spent months preparing for the ITU IHFC AI for Good Youth Robotics Challenge 2025.
By the time they reached the national finale, they were confident in what they had built.
Then they looked around at some of the other teams.
A few of their robots looked much simpler. Some almost looked like LEGO kits.
They dismissed them at first.
After putting in that much work, it was easy to believe they had built the stronger solution.
Where I got stuck
The first round changed that feeling quickly.
Those same teams were scoring identically to them.
That was the first real shock.
They had spent months trying to make their robot better, but on the scoreboard, all that extra effort was not giving them the edge they expected.
By the final round, they finished third.
Only the top two teams qualified for the international round.
Missing it by one place hurt.
Third was still something to be proud of, but when you come that close, it is hard not to think about what could have been different.
What changed
After the competition, the bigger question was not why they lost.
It was why they had assumed they were ahead in the first place.
They had focused a lot on building something impressive.
The other teams had focused on what the competition actually needed.
That changed the way Abbas approaches projects now.
He tries to understand the requirements first, find the simplest solution that works, watch for changes in the rules, and pay attention to opportunities others might miss.
After that
The competition changed more than just how he prepares.
It changed how he thinks about engineering.
He no longer assumes that more complexity means a better solution.
Now, the first question is much simpler:
What actually needs to be solved?
What stayed with me
They had confused technical sophistication with objective superiority. Sometimes the better solution is not the one that looks the most impressive. It is the one that understands the objective better. And sometimes, as he put it, "you just have to play your cards right".
