Water challenge for school students

The British Council, supported by the Supreme Council of Education and Rolls-Royce, yesterday launched the Big Science Challenge, a research competition open to secondary schools across Qatar that will see students tackle one of the greatest challenges facing the region: water. Teams of five students each aged 11-16 from Qatari schools will join students from Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Britain in identifying and solving water-related problems in a competition that will run for approximately four months, ending in March. The winning team from Qatar will be accompanied by a teacher on a week-long trip to London where they will present their entries in an international forum. They will also visit the Rolls-Royce plant, as well as enjoy other cultural activities. One team from the UK will win a trip to Dubai for five days. Participating teams will be expected to identify a specific problem around the theme “water” that they will try and solve. They must state in detail the findings of their research into the issue, particularly information relevant on an international level.They will have to methodically provide information on all their activities and findings, and then finally provide a detailed drawing or prototype of the solution to the problem they have tried to address. Simone Winetroube, director of the British Council in Qatar, yesterday told a group of schoolteachers and administrators that although the Council has recently been working to partner with the Qatar Science and Technology Park, high level co-operation and research can only continue to happen in the future if the younger generation learns to think critically to tackle important issues. Sabah al-Haidous, director of the Education Institute at the Supreme Education Council (SEC) responded positively to The Big Science Challenge, saying that the SEC will support the programme by “providing teachers and students with the resources required to help execute the research and find appropriate solutions.”