DOHA, QATAR – A team of students from Al Resala Secondary School captured first place in the Second Annual Ibtikar Qatar competition held at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar Saturday, January 30. The winning team, The Charismatic Doctors, presented their poster, IPodetes, which leverages the IPod as a platform for their project. Hamza 3 from Hamza Bin Abdul Motaleb School and SST from Amna Bint Wahab Independent School won second and third place respectively. The winning team also received a prize from Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar for their in-depth analysis of diabetes. The prize was presented by Dr. Mohamud Verjee, faculty member at Weill Cornell.
"The Charismatic Doctors team came up with a great idea to leverage a hand-held technology that many people are already familiar with and develop specific applications for patients with diabetes, and were very thorough and professional in presenting their idea to the judges," said Selma Limam Mansar, Ph.D., information systems coordinator at Carnegie Mellon Qatar.
Ibtikar Qatar is an information systems innovation competition that encourages high school seniors and juniors to get involved with solving a real-world problem using information technology, while at the same time raising their interest in the dynamic field of information systems. The theme of this year’s competition was to use information systems to support diabetic patients to better manage their chronic illness. The theme was selected due to the significant increase in the incidence of diabetes in Qatar and to raise awareness of the issue among the Qatari youth.
Twenty-five teams representing 17 schools participated in this year’s competition, including ten schools that participated for the first time. The two-part program began with a workshop in November. At the workshop, 100 students from 20 schools were organized into teams and learned the rules of the competition. They also learned how to design a poster in order to explain and present their project. Students were exposed to healthcare information systems and learned important techniques in designing information systems under the mentorship of Carnegie Mellon Qatar students.
The final projects were presented during the competition. Teams were judged based on the originality of their idea, whether it used information systems effectively, its impact on raising awareness, poster design and how well it was presented. The judging panel was made up of Jayalakshmi G., MES Indian School; K. Rajya Lakshmi, MES Indian School; Rafat Issa Al Ghenam, Hamza Hamza Bin Abdul Motaleb School; Alexander Cheek, information systems professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar; Dirakaren Liginlal, information systems professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar; Ian Lacey, information systems professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar; Limam Mansar and Carnegie Mellon Qatar students Shakir Hassan, Aysha Siddique and Amal Al Barwani.
Schools that participated in Ibtikar Qatar 2010 were the Academic Bridge Program, Al Bayan Secondary School, Al Jazeera Academy, Al-Resala Secondary School, Al-Wakra Secondary School, Amna Bint Wahab Independent School, Doha College, Global Academy International, Hamza Bin Abdul Motaleb School, Lebanese School of Doha, M.E.S. Indian School, The Newtown International School, Om Ayman School, Omar Bin Al-Khattab Secondary School, Qatar Independent School, Raba’a Al-Adawiya School and the Sudanese Community School.
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