Team Qatar, mentored by Texas A&M University at Qatar (Tamuq), a Qatar Foundation (QF) partner university, has won two awards – the Safety and Social Media Awards – at the FIRST Global Challenge, held in Geneva, Switzerland recently.
The high-schoolers were put through a rigorous training programme led by the university’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) experts, Benjamin Cieslinski and Tala Katbeh.
The FIRST Global Challenge is an Olympics-style, international robotics competition that takes place in a different country each year.
Teams work together to complete tasks in a game themed around one of the greatest challenges facing our planet, including the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering, in an effort to foster understanding and co-operation among the youth of the world as they use their abilities to solve the world’s problems, a press statement noted.
Teams from 180 countries participated in the competition.
The Safety Award is presented to the teams who exemplify good safety standards in their pits and on the field.
The Social Media Award is presented to the teams who completed the online challenges – those are tasks that teams must complete to share with the world (and other teams) the technical and general details of their work.
The team trained at Texas A&M at Qatar’s university’s STEM Hub, a joint initiative between Tamuq and the Qatar National Research Fund.