Muscat: The seventh national level IT competition titled ‘iTech Marathon’ involving 148 students concluded recently at the University of Technology and Applied Sciences (UTAS) Ibri.
The competition is part of the academic goals of the colleges in the Sultanate of Oman. The completion had challenge based learning that contributed to innovation, creativity, and employability.
“The annual event “iTech Marathon” consists of series of challenges and sense of competitions among students from higher educational institutes on the first day to encourage the students to outperform in the field of scientific research and innovation challenge, project demonstration, programming competition, mobile development competition, networking competition, and mathematics competition, followed by technical exhibitions under the name “iTech Techno” on the second day,” said a faculty member involved in the competition.
It aimed to enrich industrial and business cooperation and to enhance the knowledge of the students and graduates about the applications of the technologies in the market and industries, “iTech Techno” event gives a place for the companies and institutes that are related to information technology and innovation to exhibit their services and products to the students and alumni. Several companies demonstrated their innovative IT products on Robotics, 3D Printing, IoT, Digital Designing, Security and Programming on the second day of the event.
Hind bint Salim bin Said al Mahrouqiyah, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs, said the event was aimed at “meeting the goals of the Oman Vision 2040, to achieve academic excellence, to identify and extract problem solving skills among students, to provide a platform and share student’s ideas and innovations, and to provide a platform for students to view the latest innovative products displayed by companies.”
Dr Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Ali al Manthari, Dean of UTAS-Ibri and Dr Nasser bin Salim bin Mohammed al Kalbani, Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs attended the opening ceremony. They lauded the student participants who joined from 10 different universities in the country.
Dr Junaid Qadir, Professor at the Qatar University, Doha, presented a keynote address on ‘Engineering and computing education for the 21st century: A student primer’. Dr Amal bint Bati Said al Abriyah, Head of IT department distributed the awards, and certificates among the winners. In her talk, she mentioned, “iTech Marathon is a great platform for national students to showcase the skills and talents. Students enjoyed meeting with different level of people to improve communication, collaboration, sharing ideas, innovation, technological awareness, and competitive skills. The winners deserve it for today and the other participants have received the experience to win in the future events”.
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