Texas A&M at Qatar and Carnegie Mellon Qatar organize VEX Robotics Qatar Championship
Published Jul 25, 2022
Qatar Foundation partner universities Texas A&M University at Qatar and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) organized the VEX Robotics Competition – Qatar Championship for high school students.
Sixteen teams participated in the second edition of the advanced robotics competition, held this year at the Qatar Science and Technology Secondary School (QSTSS).
VEX Robotics is part of Innovation First International, a leader in educational and competitive robotics products that provides educational robotics kits and challenges for students of all ages.
STEM experts from Texas A&M at Qatar Dr. Mohamed Gharib, Tala Katbeh and Benjamin Cieslinski and Nour Tabet from Carnegie Mellon in Qatar developed a customized course based on the VEX Robotics Competition to mentor the students. The team prepared a unique learning course through a combination of in-person and online lectures to guide the school’s students and teachers as they learned the structural components and programming of the VEX Robotics kits.
Gharib said, “The goal of the course was to equip students and teachers with new skills that will enable them to tackle technical and design challenges while learning programming. Developing students’ problem-solving skills along with computational thinking is crucial for Qatar’s National Vision 2030, in unlocking human potential through investing in education. The way the course was designed also encouraged students to use their creativity, teamwork and leadership to devise solutions to given engineering challenges.”
Dr. Rani Altoum, QSTSS Vice Principal, said, “Participating in this competition contributes to the refinement of students' experiences and develops their skills in creative, design thinking and engineering processes, it also contributes significantly to the development of productive collaborative work and effective communication skills that the future labor market needs. We thank Dr. Gharib, and the organizers for the opportunity that this competition has given our students. We hope that this collaboration will continue and develop in order to graduate more students interested in STEM disciplines, primarily robotic design and programming.”
The VEX Robotics challenge is one of the several global competitions that STEM experts at Texas A&M Qatar mentored students for over the past few years.