Ilker Baybars, dean and CEO of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, attended the opening ceremonies of the first Educational Festival, a four-day event organized by Al Faisal Without Borders Foundation (Alf) under the patronage of HE Dr. Mohammed Abdul Wahed Ali Al Hamadi, the Minister of Education and Higher Education for the State of Qatar.

CMU-Q’s Alice Middle East was featured at the festival at an interactive booth that hosted school children from across Qatar.

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, Her Highness Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser expressed an interest in bringing the software to Qatar. Associate professor of computer science Saquib Razak has served as the lead principle investigator for the creation of Alice Middle East, which involved localizing and adapting Alice for a Qatari and Arabic audience. Qatar National Research Fund’s National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) funded the project in 2012.

Twelve government and international schools are using Alice Middle East for their Information Communication Technology (ICT) courses in the 2016-17 academic year. Next year, CMU-Q and the Ministry of Education and Higher Education are preparing to roll out the program in all Qatar schools that teach ICT.