Tech-savvy

Dubai Women's College girls win in The UAE Educational IT Challenge

The UAE Educational IT Challenge, which was launched in September 2001 as an initiative by Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Chancellor of UAE University and Higher Colleges of Technology, declared the winners of the 2002 challenge at a gala evening held on Saturday at the Emirates Towers.

In the category of the student's projects, four students of Dubai Women's College were the winners. In all, 53 projects from the students were submitted from students in different faculties of the college.

Out of these eight were selected in the finals and three of them won the challenge. The categories in which they won were the best student project from different colleges and universities; UAE national project and the e-commerce students won in another UAE national category.

The winners will be going to Rome to attend the second phase of the IT challenge.

"Hello Kids", a project by four final year software engineering students, won the award for the best student project. This project is a fully interactive website designed to educate children under the age of nine.

It presents subjects like science, maths and English through visual games and fun activities. The website also includes other features such as a kids club, a parents page as well as an evaluation page.

Huda Al Rais, one of the designers of the project, said, "This is the first step towards communicating globally."

Another student, Muna Hussein Al Qallaf, said that the idea of this project came from the fact that everything in Dubai was going e, right from e-commerce to e-government, so they wanted to be innovative and develop a programme which was involved with e-education and they focussed on primary schools.

Faculty members Doug Westcott and Karen Peterson provided the technical guidance and support to these students.

The other two award winners were information technology students who developed an ILCR (Independent Learning Centre Resources) project that provided a database of information related in this field. The e-commerce students build a knowledge portal for e-business.

"Since this is the first year that we are running the e-commerce programme we wanted to build a portal which served as a knowledge resource centre for the students who joined in the following academic year.

It started as a class project but the incentive at the end of the day was that the best project would be sent for the IT Challenge and this served as a motivation for all students to perform well," added K.V.N. Rao, business faculty member teaching in the e-commerce programme.

The judging panel consisted of IT professionals, teachers, experts and corporate people. Three judges who ranked them according to merit checked each project before selecting the winners.