On Thursday, US Embassy Minister Counselor for Public Diplomacy Ruben Harutunian hosted a group of eleven Egyptian university students and two mentors who recently returned from the prestigious NASA Space Camp in the United States.
The selected members represented the three winning teams at a US Embassy-sponsored NASA Space Apps Hackathon event at American University in Cairo (AUC) which took place in October, 2023.
The competition motivated Egyptian university students to discover, address, and explore solutions for various issues related to space explorations, artificial intelligence, climate change, and water conservation.
All participants met former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, who visited Egypt in 2023 and is getting ready to travel to space with Blue Origin in October 2024.
The three winning teams travelled to the United States and participated in several activities including a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and a program at NASA Headquarters in Houston, Texas, where the students met with NASA engineers, including Egyptian Engineer Mohamed El Wassimy.
Minister Counselor for Public Diplomacy Ruben Harutunian said on this event: “the reason why we decided to make this event is because you all exemplify the partnership that we hope to advance between the United States and Egypt, particularly in the space field. We think this is a place where our two governments and our two societies have a lot to learn from each other and a lot to share with one another. And space should be for all humanity."
He added: "Your projects are really great examples of that. I'm so proud that we were able to sponsor the hackathon and then allow you also to go to the United States to be ambassadors for Egypt, to be ambassadors for this relationship between our two countries."
"The U.S. government and the U.S. embassy in Cairo is really focused on supporting STEM education and particularly the involvement of women in STEM. and particularly the involvement of women in STEM. And we have a number of programs that we really target towards those goals and that population because we really think STEM education and STEM in general, whether it's AI or whether it's IT and programming or whether it's biomedical engineering."
Speaking to two of the participants about their experience in the visit, and how this experience impacted them as promising researchers, Farah Osama told SEE News that before they travel, they have some concerns of how people would approach them, but, everything went great. They added that after visiting the camp in Houston that they were surprised how much the camp staff welcomed them, greeted them, cooperated with them.
They highlighted that they met a lot of Arab American researchers, and Egyptian senior staff members.
She highlighted that they were told to be the next generation of ambassador of their lands in the field of sciences.
Reem Adel also told us about her team's project of establishing an entertaining and educating children's game to teach them more about space, and the eclipse phenomena. She added that they were keen to motivate the children to use all their senses and interact with the information that is why they supported the game with a model and E-book.
Both reflected that they hope to work with the Egyptian Space Agency, and continue their studies to be the earliest Egyptian female vailed space astronauts.
Saied Mounir, who is one of the mentors for the group talked to us about the competition. He said that the process is complex as they are various cooperating team but regarding competition team it concerned with accepting the participants, filtering them, and call the judging committee. Mounir pointed out that the number of the participants in Cairo exceeded 2500 students, shortened to 700.
The 700 represented the accepted teams, therefore, they joined a camp to have more sessions about how to manage their time and projects.
Another participating mentor Basel Mohamed added that all domains that could be related to space applications like AI, editing, education, engineering, medicine, and other. The competition ask the participants to use their background to solve a problem and present an effective solution.
Mounir revealed that the competition in every city in the world is different from Cairo, as in Cairo, there are volunteers to moderate the 48 hours of the competition, and organize a camp about the fields of the competition and how to manage the two-day competition.
About the importance of bringing the winners to the US, Mohamed added that the main target of the trip is connecting the students to the latest and most advanced scientific updates and technologies in the space field.
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