Al Khor International School, Omar Bin Al-khattab Secondary School, Middle East International School, Al Arqam Academy for Girls, Arwa Bint Abd Almotaleb Secondary School for Girls, and Al Bayan Secondary School have won the top five places in the Alice Middle East Programming Competition.
The event for schools using the Alice Middle East software for their information communication technology (ICT) courses and hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) saw 125 students from 12 government and international schools coming together to showcase their programming skills.
For the 2017-18 academic year, CMU-Q and the Ministry of Education and Higher Education are preparing to roll out the programme in all Qatar schools that teach ICT.
“As more schools use Alice Middle East, students in Qatar will continue to develop the concrete skills they will need for their careers,” said Ilker Baybars, dean and CEO of CMU-Q.
The students developed their Alice projects in the classroom and presented to the judges on competition day. Teams were judged on creativity, oral presentation skills, and use of motion, design, camera and sound. The judges represented academic and business organisations in Qatar, including the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Ministry of Transportation and Communication, Qatar Computing Research Institute, College of the North Atlantic-Qatar, Education Above All and Foresight.
Fahad Hamad al-Mohannadi, general manager of Qatar Electricity and Water Company, which contributed the prizes, remarked that it is through programmes like Alice Middle East that the foundation of Qatar’s knowledge-based economy is built.
Alice is interactive educational software that guides students through the basics of programming as they create virtual worlds and animations. The original Alice software was developed at the Pittsburgh campus of Carnegie Mellon. In 2008, HH Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser expressed an interest in bringing the software to Qatar. Associate professors of computer science Saquib Razak and Yonina Cooper, who retired in 2013, submitted a proposal to localise Alice for the Middle East. Qatar National Research Fund’s National Priorities Research Programme funded the project in 2012.
Razak, an associate teaching professor of computer science and the lead principle investigator of the Alice Middle East project, said: “Building on the success of last year’s inaugural competition, we are delighted to see such a brilliant effort from the students once again. We saw a number of projects developed that we did not think were possible with Alice.”
