Qatar University’s (QU) Al-Bairaq, which is a non-traditional educational project, in which students at Qatari secondary school work in teams with highly exquisite university-level scientists, wins the bronze award in the 2018 Reimagine Education conference, where 1,150 educational projects compete in 17 categories. Al-Bairaq is the first Qatari program to win the award for three consecutive years and the only Arab program to won in the category “cultivating curiosity,” demonstrating the distinction and visibility of the program on a global scale and its recognition by global learning institutions as a successful program with strong output.
Reimagine Education is an international conference and competition aimed at recognizing and rewarding the most successful institutions, programs, and projects in creating educational initiatives and innovations that promote student-learning outcomes and qualifying them for the job market. The award is a partnership between Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, and QS Quacquarelli Symonds, which is known as a leader in universities ranking worldwide.
Al-Bairaq was invited by the organizers of the event to attend the conference in San Francisco, California, to give a detailed presentation about the program on a global platform to a leading audience in education, as a final step towards evaluation. Engineer Ruba Ali, a member of the Al-Bairaq team, gave the presentation about the program, its objectives, methodology and innovative style in stimulating enthusiasm and curiosity of students to learn science and to disseminate the foundations and culture of scientific research among students in Qatar.
During the presentation, Al-Bairaq’s most recent teaching tools and innovative educational methods were explained to audiences. The most important of these is the STEAM curriculum, which offers an integrated curriculum of science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. Al-Bairaq presented its inquiry-based learning method, which is a form of active learning that begins with asking questions, problems, or scenarios. Fatima Al-Maadeed, a former student in Al-Bairaq and a current student at QU, participated in the conference poster session to present her research project and share her experiences at the program.
The program was launched in 2010 by the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM) at QU, under the leadership of Dr. Noora Al-Thani, President of Al Bairaq Program and Head of Communication and Outreach at QU. Since its inception, it has been on a path of achievements and successes to achieve a supreme goal of developing Qatari youth and preparing them for the future to make them qualified to play vital roles in Qatar and encourage them to study the fields of science and engineering at the university and research. This is done by introducing a new method of learning to acquire science through practical experiments and conduct research in the framework of stimulating curiosity, innovation and invention focused on building knowledge and developing various skills.