At AbuIssa Holding, we value and fully practice our CSR strategy in all corporate activities. Earlier in March, we took part in Alice Middle East Programming Competition for middle and high school students at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q).
Alice Middle East is an educational software program that teaches students the fundamental programming concepts as they produce animated movies and simple videos. Originally developed at Carnegie Mellon’s main campus in the US, Alice was adapted locally by researchers at CMU-Q, with the support of a National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) grant from QNRF. Under the supervision of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Alice Middle East is now part of the curriculum at Qatar’s government schools that teach information communication technology. This year, a team from Al Arqam Academy was awarded first place during the competition.
The competition was sponsored by Abu Issa Holding, a strategic partner of CMU-Q. The Chairman and CEO, Ashraf Abu Issa, observed that many of the Alice projects were directly linked to Qatar: “Many of these student-led projects show us how young people view Qatar. It is very encouraging to see many young minds envisioning a technological and advanced future for Qatar.”
The competition was the culmination of weeks of preparation by the teams, who created animations divided into categories including: education, social good, the environment, tourism and video games. The teams were judged based on their programming skills, creativity, oral presentations and teamwork.