Team Voyager of Bangladesh won the NASA Championship

The ‘Team Voyager’ of Bangladesh won the world championship for the 4th time by defeating 8715 teams from 152 countries at the International Space Apps Challenge organized by the US Space Research Organization (NASA). NASA announced the names of the winners on Tuesday at 10 pm Bangladesh time.

The ‘Team Voyager’ won the World Championship in NASA's Best Story Telling category by creating a four-step 'Aqua Explorer' game. Khalid Saqib, the Team Leader of the Team Voyager of Rajshahi Barendra University wrote the original story. Fahmida Akhtar was the research assistant throughout the process. Abdul Malek highlighted the incident on the mobile app. In addition, Md Sakhawat Hossain was the UIUX designer and Md. Atiq was the level designer.

Khalid Saqib, the Team Leader of the Team Voyager of Rajshahi Barendra University told Digibangla that the main theme of the project is "Everything starts with water". There are 370 quintillion gallons of water on Earth, but only 0.01 of that is safe water for us to use. Through this we tried to explain to the students the flow of water in the earth system and how this precious resource is contributing to our climate change. From participating virtually to becoming a world champion, this journey was not so easy for us. But now every one of us is very excited to present the name of our country in the world perspective. Thanks to God again, Alhamdulillah!

Ariful Hasan Apu and Mahdi-uz-Zaman discharged their duties as Advisors for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2023; Tanveer Hossain Khan, Director of BASIS was the convenor of the Bangladesh episode this time.

Congratulating the winners, Tanveer said, “This world championship is a testament to our creativity and technological prowess. Bangladesh have once again showed that competing at the highest level of the global stage is how to pull off a victory. We are extremely proud of our champions and congratulate them for their hard work.”

Russell T Ahmed, President of BASIS, said, “Our world championship in the NASA Space Apps Challenge is yet another testament to the huge strides that Bangladeshis have made in terms of potential and innovation in the IT sector. I warmly congratulate our world-winning team and all the advisors, mentors, judges and volunteers associated with it for hoisting the flag of Bangladesh in front of the world for the fourth time in total with this hat-trick win”.

Notably, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration-NASA is implementing this program with the aim of finding innovative solutions to solve various global problems of the world by bringing together talented young people from 152 countries of the world, such as technicians, scientists, designers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, etc. In October of this year, BASIS organized the Bangladesh Episode in 9 cities of Bangladesh (Dhaka, Chattogram, Sylhet, Rajshahi, Khulna, Barisal, Rangpur, Mymensingh and Cumilla). It should be noted that in 2018, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology's Team Aleek became the world champion by creating a virtual application that would give the experience of traveling to the moon in the 'Lunar VR Project' Best Use of Data category. Khulna University of Engineering and Technology (KUET) and Bangladesh Army University of Engineering and Technology (BAUET) joint team 'Team Mohakash' won the World Championship in the 'Best Mission Concept' category in 2021 and 'Team Diamonds' in the 'Most Inspiring' category became the champion in 2022.