News and Events

Qatar Tribune publishes this article on the schools’ participation in Alice competition held at CMU Qatar. The competition was to create an animation or game using the Alice software, where these projects were then judged by a mix of professors, researchers, teachers, and industry professionals. The competition concluded with 5 teams winning best projects and other 3 special category prizes.

“’Alice’ came to the attention of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, at Pausch’s untimely death in 2008. At her request, CMU-Q developed a Middle Eastern version that incorporates the culture and traditions of Qatar.”

-Qatar Tribune

“Alice Middle East is an excellent resource to introduce computational thinking to young people, who will need these crucial problem-solving skills when they enter the workforce,”

-Ilker Baybars, dean and CEO of CMU-Q.

You can read the full article here

The Peninsula covered Alice held on May 8th in Doha, the first national wide competition involving private and public schools with over 140 participating students. This event was organized by the Alice Middle East (Alice ME) project, an initiative to introducing computing education in K-12 in Qatar.

“The event received widespread support from industry and government, with Qatar National Research Fund, the Ministry of Education, Qatar University, Qatar Computing Research Institute and Qatar Airways contributing experts to the judging panel.”

–The Peninsula

“Because these students are so imaginative and they are using the Alice software in ways I hadn’t even thought of before, I got to learn a few new things from these projects myself. This is very positive as we look to expand Alice Middle East in the coming years.”

-Saquib Razak, project lead.  

You can read the full article here

Carnegie Mellon University’s magazine OnQ features Alice team participation at Qatar’s Annual Research Conference ARC’16 where they showed case students work. Their participation at Alice booth gave chance to interested students, teachers and parents to know how they can get involved to use the tool and their benefit from its free access gift.  

You can read the full article here

Alice tool to introduce programming in a fun simple context in contrast with the norm of how computing is known to be a challenging difficult task. This article highlights the starting initiative of Alice to teach computing in Qatar schools.

You can read the full article here