The final of the BRICS Future Skills & Tech Challenge (international championship in promising technologies and skills) was held at Kazan Vocational School of Information Technology and Communications September 22nd through September 27th. Ekaterina Urbakh, a postgraduate student majoring in Electrotechnical Complexes and Systems from South Ural State University, represented the Chelyabinsk Region in the contest as a teacher of the Smena educational complex; her team took the second place in the Internet of Things category.
In total, more than five hundred participants from sixteen countries joined the contest. Within three days, the teams had to develop from scratch a production site management system, as well as user interfaces and a documentation package for this system.
The finals were organised in seventeen categories, distributed among three main areas: New and Promising Markets, Digital Economy, and New Production. In the Internet of Things category, the SUSU postgraduate student demonstrated her expertise.
Since 2021, Ekaterina Urbakh has been acting as an expert for school teams in the Internet of Things category in the Professionals movement championship, while being an active member of the expert community for this competence in the Russian Federation.
“In May, my students took the first place in the all-Russian stage of the championship and we were invited to take part in the BRICS international championship," said SUSU postgraduate Ekaterina Urbakh. “After 2022, this is the largest stage available to teams from the Russian Federation. Since my students are underage, I decided to participate myself: I gathered a team, which also included mentors of school teams from Novosibirsk and Kazan.”
We trained, competed, and took the second place with a gap of just 2 points from the winners; and this is great because none of our team members have ever participated in the championship on their own, and we did not have the opportunity to prepare together since we all live in different cities in different time zones and have full-time jobs. We exchanged experiences with international and Russian colleagues from the industry, which is also valuable. This is a championship of professional excellence, that is, participants compete in the level of proficiency in professional skills in accordance with national and international standards. Our task was related to the creation of high-level control systems for automated (including robotic) industrial complexes using Internet of Things technologies. The results confirmed my level of professional excellence and gave me experience that I will use in my teaching and engineering activities."
The championship is aimed at technological cooperation and creation of joint projects and products of the BRICS countries, interaction of educational organizations, joint scientific research in such areas as drones, prototypes of a cross-border settlement system for BRICS; as well as the creation of digital models of production, proposals for the automation of business processes on the 1C platform and in a number of other systems.
The Future Skills Challenge is an annual championship, first held at the initiative of the BRICS countries in Kazan in 2019. In 2020, the championship was organized by Russia, in 2021 – by Russia and China. In 2022, it was organized by China, in 2023 – by South Africa. In 2024, Russia, as the BRICS chair, will again act as the organizer. Next year, the championship finals will be held in Brazil.