QF partner Texas A&M at Qatar mentors high school students for FIRST Global Challenge robotics competition

QF partner Texas A&M at Qatar mentors high school students for FIRST Global Challenge robotics competition

Fifteen high school students from Qatar are undergoing rigorous training sessions at Texas A&M University at Qatar, a Qatar Foundation partner university, as they prepare to represent Qatar at the FIRST Global challenge to be held in Geneva, Switzerland.

The FIRST Global Challenge is an Olympics-style, international robotics competition that takes place in a different country each year. Teams work together to complete tasks in a game themed around one of the greatest challenges facing our planet, including the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering, in an effort to foster understanding and cooperation among the youth of the world as they use their abilities to solve the world’s problems.

Team Qatar, which includes students from eight different schools, is mentored by Texas A&M at Qatar’s STEM experts Tala Katbeh’2015 and Benjamin Cieslinski’1995 in the university’s STEM Hub, a joint initiative between Texas A&M at Qatar and Qatar National Research Fund. The team members are formed as part of the SHRC initiative (STEM Hub Robotics Club) at Texas A&M at Qatar, which was established in 2019 to teach students around Qatar about the importance of STEM through robotics.

This year’s theme, “Carbon Capture,” brought together students from different nations to work towards understanding and coming