Events & News

April 23, 2009 The College of Information Technology at United Arab Emirates University organized the second UAE IT Marathon: An IT Knowledge Contest and Project Showcase Competition. Over 450 talented students from high schools throughout the UAE met with peers and academics to expand their IT literacy scope and encourage IT innovation. Over 70 schools were represented through their elte students,

IT Marathon provides two separate competition opportunities for high-school students: Knowledge Contest and Projects Showcase. High school student teams from around the country proudly entered the top-notch College of Information Technology facility at the UAE University in Al-Ain on Thursday April 23rd, 2009 to compete in a comprehensive IT Contest and/or Showcase.

Talent Revealing Contetst

The objective of the contest is to create an atmosphere of IT awareness among UAE high school students to further trigger interests in this paramount discipline. The competition stimulates and challenges young minds to develop their general IT skills in prominent and most appealing areas, including solving simple programming problems, creating illustrative graphics and interactive web applications, and troubleshooting basic computing and network systems. Top ranked teams will win valuable prizes and receive trophies from executive education operators in the country.

Innovative Projects Showcase

Besides the IT knowledge and skills contest, IT Marathon also invited high school student teams to participate in the IT Showcase, which is a separate event held as part of the IT Marathon. IT Showcase is a unique opportunity for students to proudly display their school projects to peers, university students, academics and industry experts. IT Showcase reveals student project exhibits and demos through the most comprehensive range of creative IT displays and projects developed by school students. The top six student projects qualify to the Final stage. Project selection for the Finals is performed by a committee of high school teachers, industry experts and university academics. Finalists are selected to make a short public and live presentation to the audience of their project during the Awards Ceremony, where they may answer further questions from an executive panel of judges. The best three projects in the IT Showcase were then announced and awarded alongside the winners in the IT Contest.

All Under One Roof!

IT Marathon 2009 is geared to provide young minds with a unique opportunity to display their talents and make an IT impact that could trigger a promising career. It also provides schools with a forum to exchange curricular and teaching experiences of IT related subjects through various interaction opportunities.

To join this national one-stop IT forum for high schools, the UAE University has worked closely with Education Zones across the country to nominate talented and IT inspired student teams to participate in IT Marathon.