Festival is held under patronage of Mohammed Bin Zayed
The third edition of the National Science, Technology and Innovation Festival 2019 will kick off at Dubai Festival Arena tomorrow Thursday, January 31st under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.
The festival is an anticipated annual event that constitutes a significant pillar for consolidating the Ministry of Education's educational vision of implementing innovative pioneering education for skillful generations in line with the government's orientations and the UAE Vision 2021, which seeks to render innovation an essential feature of the UAE society.
The festival, which aims at achieving a set of educational objectives supported by selected programs, activities and events to render innovation a lifestyle, will see the participation of around 1665 male and female students. As many as 200 innovative projects by the students of the Emirati School Model will be showcased during the festival.
In a bid to improve its orientations by expanding its targets, the ministry increased the number of projects likely to win the competition to 200 projects, the most outstanding of which will be selected for display at Al Bahr Palace in Abu Dhabi as part of the National Science Week 2019. The move is aimed at motivating the students, increasing their passion for knowledge, improving their academic performance and enabling them to take part in dedicated international exhibitions and forums.
A number of official spokesmen including innovation pioneers from all over the world will participate in the festival, which is substantially supported by UAE government and private institutions and entities.
The festival is in line with the wise leadership's aspirations and orientations aimed at empowering the generations in the fields of science, technology and innovation, these being an essential engine for the advancement of societies and a catalyst for entering the era of knowledge-based economy. The festival presents a great opportunity for students to showcase their ideas and innovative projects before the UAE competent authorities and enables them to develop their ideas and improve their ambitions, which the UAE relies on to carry on its process of development and modernization in all fields and sectors. The festival will host ministers and officials to share with students their experiences and opinions.
Based on its keenness on providing an attractive environment for students and parents, a Family Festival will be held concurrently with the National Science, Technology and Innovation Festival, where a group of experts, specialists and social media stars will give a summary of their experiences to the festival pioneers in wonderful sharing-based forms.
The Ministry will organize two major competitions during the festival; the first is the Science Fair for students in grades 5-12. The fair is a platform for displaying the research results that students have achieved through working on their scientific projects using scientific research methodologies. The participating projects will be evaluated by a dedicated committee tasked with selecting the best projects based on specific criteria. The projects participating in the Science Fair will deal with four domains: technology including communications, electronic systems, robotics, computing, control technologies, technological applications, biotechnology, electronic transformation and automation. The second domain is biological science and is divided into agriculture, anatomy, biochemistry, biotechnology, ecology, horticulture, physiology, medical sciences and human medicine. The third domain is social and behavioral sciences and deals with economics, geography, psycho-social studies of human behavior, nutrition science, natural history, culture and human community evolution sciences and political sciences. The fourth domain will deal with the Science Fair's competition in areas of chemistry, mathematics, physics, geology, engineering, computer programming, meteorology and astronomy.
The festival's second competition is 'Fekreti' (My Idea), which gives young elementary students (from kindergarten to grade 4) the opportunity to present their innovative ideas to qualified specialists for evaluation according to competitive bases and specific criteria such as originality of the idea, level of innovation, feasibility, expected value added and much more.
The students with the most innovative and feasible ideas will receive participation certificates and valuable in-kind prizes. The competition is aimed at encouraging and motivating students to present and discuss their ideas confidently in front of others. This will help attract the best innovative ideas, refine the personality of innovative students and encourage other students to follow suit.
31/01/2019
