US denies visas to West African teen robotics team

Well, that's one way for the administration to guarantee that the US will rank high in STEM Education, deny entry to other kids who might deserve some acknowledgement and compete with our own... Has the administration even heard about global education and social learning? One of FIRST's precepts is "Coopertition": learning through cooperative competition. How are our kids going to learn to international standards if we won't let talented peers into the country to for them learn alongside? Duh!

"US denies visas to West African teen robotics team after families scraped together fees to apply

Five students from the West African country The Gambia will have to present their robot—which they built in shift ‘rigorous shifts’ throughout Ramadan—via Skype having received application denials from the U.S. embassy in Banjul.

“We were only told that we did not qualify, and that we could try again,’ director of The Gambia’s ministry of higher education, research, science and technology Moktar Darboe told Al Jazeera, adding the team was “very disappointed” by the decision.

“They put in so much effort into building this, and now, after all the sacrifice and energy they put in, they have been left disheartened,” Darboe said.

The students had to pay $170 for each visa application. Darboe told Al Jazeera the teens’ “parents had to sacrifice a lot to pay this fee.”

Read the full article at its source:  http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/us-denies-visas-to-west-african-teen-robotics-team-after-families-scraped-together-fees-to-apply/