ICT Contest Unlocks Nigerian Students’ Potential
The performance of students of the Nigerian Turkish International Colleges (NTIC) at the recent ICT competition in Kazakhstan, which earned their ‘Live 3D’ project a silver medal, has shown Nigeria’ s potential for technological advancement. Uchechukwu Nn
In today’s world, technological inventions has continued to reshape everyday life, as well as dictating the pace of human advancement, thus a country or state can hardly develop without technology. Apart from the various inventions which have made the world a more comfortable place to live in, countries with massive technological prowess often play a “big brother’ role to others that have to depend on their technological inventions to grow.
It is believed that most third world countries are grappling with developmental challenges, not wholly on bad governance but as a result of poor emphasis on mathematics and science education, which are the cornerstone for technological inventions.
Though the federal and state governments have made efforts to strengthen sciences in schools by constantly reviewing curricula, only a little has been achieved through the efforts.
Thus determined to boost the level of science education in the country, the Nigerian Turkish International Colleges (NTIC) has continued to sustain its passion to bring out the best in Nigerian students in the area of sciences.
Reputed for its various academic feats in international and local competitions, the Turkish colleges recorded another first for Nigeria recently as students from the school won the silver medal at the fourth Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Infomatrix- Asia/Pacific competition, which held in Kazakhstan recently. Infomatrix, which was organised by Suleyman Demirel University, Ministry of Education and Commission for Science and Technology, Kazakhstan, is an international project competition aimed at encouraging students to apply their knowledge, passion and creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world today.
Apart from promoting academic excellence, this year’s edition, which attracted 315 students from 19 countries, also served as an avenue to promote intercultural dialogue and cooperation through the involvement of students and teachers from various countries.
Speaking on the exploits of the NTIC students, the Head of Computer and Institutional Technologies of the school, Mr. Erkan Yildirim, said the competition was divided into five categories, which include programming, robotics, hardware control, computer art and short movie.
The representatives of the school, Afolabi Oluwasegun Olusunkanmi and Zabadne Mohannad Joumaa competed in the Hardware Control category, just as the sophistication of their project, a 3D live video stream with home-made 3D projector known as ‘Live 3D’ was unanimously adjudged one of the best in the category. According to Yildirim, “in the competition, there are several categories, computer arts, computer design, robotics and short movie, computer hardware. We participated in the hardware category and our students designed home-made 3D projector, people can watch movies through the projectors.
“They got the idea from one of the posters in our computer room and the impact from those posters explains what is really in the cinema. And then, they asked me ‘how can we do this one’? So we conducted research about the issue. We got some materials and also got some ideas from the internet.
“Then we focused on the materials we need to make it work. We made use of two projectors. Each projector is surely the worth to each individual movie called the left eye and the right eye. When you watch the movie, it is wide in the film area, film screen. If you go to the features on the glasses, there is a special feature and left eye featuring onwards left film from the screen, the right one is what is featuring on the right film from the screen. The user who is watching this movie feels the 3D on the view.”
Speaking further on the sophistication of the 3D project, Yildirim said two digital cameras were also embedded in the project which helps in the fast transformation of the views generated.
“We added another feature to the project; we used two digital cameras, not a webcam. Two cameras, one for the left eye, one for the right eye half, the right eye camera is what transfers information, which transforms the views to the right projector and the left one is what transforms the views to the left projector. The left eye only sees what is on the left view of the screen, while the right eye only sees what is on right view of the screen.”
Asked how the students that represented NTIC as well as Nigeria in the competition were selected, he said students of the schools belong to various academic clubs, which made it easy to identify those with passion for a particular project or subject.
“We selected them from our student clubs; we have different clubs activities in our school. The first step is selecting our students who are interested in specific subjects. I coordinate the competition club. I made announcement that we have a club and those that had activities in the club at the beginning of the year and students who are interested in those particular subjects are registered for the competition.
“If the organisers of a particular competition say that your project has been selected and it is a final project, then we present it to the jury.”
While many stakeholders in the country’s education sector continue to applaud the performance of the NTIC representatives, Afolabi for their feat in Kazakstan, Yildirim, who supervised the students on the project, said the school would not rest on its oars to produce first class performance in all international competitions.
Participants from Russia, Pakistan, Venezuela, Jordan, Turkey, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Senegal, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia, Uganda, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan also took part in the competition. Apart from its latest exploits, NTIC, which has 16 branches across six states has won Nigeria several laurels in international Mathematics and Science Olympiads while the regular Annual National Mathematics Competition (ANMC) organised by the colleges in collaboration with the National Mathematical Centre (NMC) continue to stimulate students’ interest in the important subject.
Students from the Turkish Colleges account for most medals won by Nigeria in Pan-African Mathematics Olympiads (PAMO), International Mathematics Olympiads (IMO) and other International Science Olympiads.