tribune news network
doha
The Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q), a Qatar Foundation partner university, has launched summer camps in computer science for middle and high school students. The camps are an extension of MindCraft, a CMU-Q workshop that has introduced computing to more than 14,000 students in Qatar since 2016.
MindCraft is organised by the Hamad Bin Jassim Centre for K-12 Computer Science Education (HBJ Centre), a collaboration between CMU-Q and the Jassim and Hamad Bin Jassim Charitable Foundation.
Khaled Harras is the director of the HBJ Centre, a teaching professor of computer science, and the senior associate dean for faculty at CMU-Q.“You sometimes hear people say that computer science is the future, but the truth is that computer science is the present,” he said. “After running the MindCraft workshops for seven years, we were finding that students wanted more. These camps are an opportunity to delve more into programming and computing concepts and really challenge the students.”
The HBJ Centre team ran an online version of the camp over spring break, and the response was very positive. In June, the team held the first in-person camps at the Carnegie Mellon building in Education City, with more than 50 students attending two sessions.
Fawaz Eid Al Shammari, director of Support Services at Jassim and Hamad bin Jassim Charitable Foundation, said the centre represents one of the foundation’s most distinguished educational projects and an implementation of its vision of health and education for a better life. Registration is now open for MindCraft Summer Camps in July.
