The 14th annual Botball competition went down to the wire, with Qatar Academy narrowly edging out Doha Secondary and the Lebanese School to take the overall title. Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar has hosted the robotics competition for high school students since 2005; there were 21 teams who competed in Botball 2018.
As the first place team, the Qatar Academy students won a trip to Carnegie Mellon's main campus in Pittsburgh, where they will visit the world-renowned School of Computer Science.
Michael Trick, dean of CMU-Q, commented: "Botball encourages high school students to solve problems using computational language, which is at the heart of all computer science. I am delighted that these talented young people can explore the opportunities that Carnegie Mellon has to offer in computer science."
The winning team will visit Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center, as well as the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy and the Google offices that specialize in computer systems, networking, machine learning, computer vision and route planning.
Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science is a world leader in computer science education and research. The Carnegie Mellon campus in Qatar offers two undergraduate SCS programs: the bachelor of science in computer science and the bachelor of science in computational biology.