Qatar University’s (QU) Young Scientists Centre (YSC) recently held the closing ceremony for its third session of the ‘Design Thinking and Innovation Programme’, in the presence of participating students, parents and researchers.
A total of 159 students participated in the programme from the primary and preparatory stages from six schools, namely Qatar Primary School for Boys, Saad bin Moaz Primary School for Boys, Al-Manar International School, Saeed Bin Zaid Preparatory School for Boys, Ali Bin Abi Talib Preparatory School for Boys, and Salah School Al-Din Al-Ayyubi Preparatory School for Boys.
During the final ceremony, the qualified groups designed innovative prototypes, following the steps of design thinking: Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Students performed excellently in applying the design thinking principles to build their prototype. Additionally, students from the preparatory schools designed a prototype to reduce heat loss according to the competition criteria.
Primary school students applied all stages of design thinking to build a safe and environmentally friendly model for protecting and packaging a food product, considering cost, quality, innovation, and durability criteria.
A panel of judges evaluated participants’ performance and their final prototypes to choose the winner in each stage. The winners were ‘Edison Group’ from Saeed Bin Zaid Preparatory School for Boys and ‘Shabab Al-Ilm’ Group from Qatar Primary School.
The QU-YSC director Prof Noora al-Thani, praised the students and their innovations. “The students reaching this stage of cognitive awareness is an essential step in preparing them to face various challenges which would contribute to enrich human resources and build the research and scientific capabilities of the emerging generation,” she stated.