Five students from a Moldovan village just topped the world at robotics — gold, plus two silvers

Team ENIGMA, five high-school students from the village of Boscana, carried Moldova to gold at the FIRST Global Challenge 2026 in Incheon, South Korea, a robotics contest drawing national teams from nearly 190 countries. Moldova shared the winning-alliance gold with Uzbekistan, Venezuela and El Salvador, and added two silvers: one for its robot's engineering design, and one for Ember Mesh, the team's own idea — a web of small sensor capsules, dropped by drone, that can sniff out forest fires early beneath the tree canopy. It is Moldova's ninth gold at the event since 2017, built on a national school robotics programme that now runs more than 270 clubs and has reached over 60,000 students.