DOHA, QATAR – A team of students from Doha College captured first place in the 3rd annual Ibtikar Qatar competition held at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar on Saturday, January 22. The winning team, NEXT, presented their poster which explains the design of their iPhone application, Biotrack. Underground Technology Movement from Global Academy International and EcoBiotechs also from Global Academy International won second and third place respectively. The winning team also received iPads, sponsored by Qatar Shell.
“The winning team, NEXT from Doha College, designed a sophisticated iPhone application. It uses the wonders of social networks including Facebook and Twitter, to connect the residents of Qatar to Qatar’s nature and biodiversity environment. The application creatively combines the features of iphones to access a BioMap (geotagging), a BioFeeds (RSS feeds), a BioPics (Photo galleries) and a BioCam (GoogleMaps) to access a wealth of information on Qatar’s rich biodiversity (plants and animals) in an entertaining way.” Said Selma Limam Mansar, Ph.D., information systems coordinator at Carnegie Mellon Qatar.
Ibtikar is an information systems innovation competition for high school seniors and juniors that encourages students to design creative solutions to some of the important current challenges that society is facing using information technology, while at the same time raising their interest in the dynamic field of information systems. This year’s challenge was to design an iPhone application to help promote the United Nations goals for the 2010 year of Biodiversity. This theme was chosen to provide awareness about the challenges of reducing biodiversity in Qatar.
The two-part program began with a workshop in November. At the workshop, 91 students from 17 schools were organized into teams and learned the roles of the competition. They also learned how to design a poster in order to explain and present their project. Students were exposed to the role that Information Systems and innovation play in the marketplace and they also gained a basic understanding of biodiversity.
“Ibtikar is a journey; the participants spent two months intensively collaborating in teams on their ideas, coming up with technology innovation and using their critical thinking skills. The students were mentored by Carnegie Mellon’s students who provided them with advice and feedback. We would like to see the participating schools integrate Ibtikar into their meta-curriculum thus offering more critical support to the students during the two month preparation for the competition,.” This would help to continue to elevate the quality of the submissions,” said Limam Mansar.
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 of raising awareness, poster design and how well it was presented. The judging panel consisted of: Dr. April Conkey, (ecology and conservation biology) professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar,; Dr. Daniel Phelps, (information systems) professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar,; Dr. Divakaran Linginal Divakaran, (information systems) professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar,; Dr. Ian Lacey, (information systems) professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar,; Dr. Selma Limam Mansar, (information systems) professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar and Alex Cheek, (design) professor at Carnegie Mellon Qatar.
The schools that presented posters in the Ibtikar Qatar 2011 final competition were Al Wakrah Secondary Independent School, Doha College, Doha Independent Secondary School, Global Academy International, Ideal Indian School, MES Indian School, Omar Bin Al-Khattab Secondary Independent School, Raba’a A-Adwyria Secondary Independent School and The International School of Choueifat.
