Qatar National Scratch Coding Competition

Events Details

Under the patronage of UNESCO, this competition, which is a premiere in Qatar, it is oriented to acknowledge young innovative talents and it aims to inspire next generation of Qatari and residents to pursue careers in STEM-related fields in order to enhance the creation of more sustainable educational and economic future, in support of the national vision of Qatar 2030.

The National Vision 2030 is to transform Qatar into a knowledge-based economy; computer science knowledge is a must that concretises this vision.

This exciting competition is organized by the French-Qatari School Voltaire and is part of the National Scientific Research Week which is a collaboration between the Ministry of Education and Higher Education and Qatar National Research Fund. Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC) is proudly our digital partner.

QNSCC is open to all students aged from 6 to 18 years old, in primary, middle and high schools in Qatar, and to students attending after-school coding clubs. The competition is open also for independent teams (e.g. home-schooled).

The students may work with a mentor/coach to create and program their own interactive stories, animations or games using Scratch programming language.

Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Projects can be about anything related to the theme of this edition. The only limit is students’ imagination!

The competition theme is STEM: Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The registration for the Qatar National Scratch Coding Competition will be opened in December 7th, 2017.

The graduation ceremony will be held in March 14th 2018 at Qatar National Convention Center, Education City.

There will be separate awards for more than 13 participants.

For the first edition, we will be hosting two competition categories, open category and regular category.

The open category is open to participants who are 6 to 18 years old. (3 levels: elementary, junior and senior). Please visit the rules sections for more details.

Regular Category is limited to students who are 13 to 18 years old.

Open category :

In the Open Category competitions, students create a video game, a story or an animation project, in english, arabic or french, that follows the competition theme and share the project online via the Scratch website at scratch.mit.edu. Each entry will be reviewed by a panel of judges. The judges will award points according to the judging score card, which provides detailed information in relation to what the Judges will be looking for. Participant are invited to submit their projects through the compeition website after creating their own account. Projects are submitted by sharing the online link (URL) of their project from Scratch website.

A selected top teams from the open category will be invited between February 23rd and March 10th to present their projects in front of a panel of judges to determinate the final winners.

The detailed scoring rubric for the Open Category judging is available in judging criteria section.

Regular challenge category :

In this category, students will have three hours to solve with Scratch, a real time problem related to the STEM. It could be a mathematics problem, science, technology or engineering related problems.

The challenge will be held at the Qatar National Convention Center (QNCC). Please check our agenda for more details.