Dubai team wins Nasa hackathon
dubai — With the UAE’s plans to build the first city on Mars, five Egyptian students who just won the Dubai leg of a Nasa hackathon have one piece of advice for the country: “Apply and follow renewable energy solutions to make the Mars city sustainable”.
Aysha Mahmoud, Youssef ElMetwally, Mahmoud Goda, Youssef Enbaby and Marwa Esmail — known as ‘Team Inspirers’ — came out on top during the latest Nasa International Space Apps Challenge.
Dubai was the first location in the world to kick off the world’s largest hackathon, in which an estimated 25,000 residents of 187 cities participated. With hundreds of students from the GCC region taking part in the Dubai leg, ‘Team Inspirers’ beat off competition from around 36 teams here.
The five coding enthusiasts created their app — in a span of just 48 hours — to evaluate environmental, social, and economic data to design tools and plan blueprints for smart and connected rural and urban settlements.
“Our robot was created to solve transportation issues in a technological way. It utilises features such as infrared, sound and ultrasonic sensors and we opted to use a battery-powered robot to save electricity,” Mahmoud told Khaleej Times.
In addition, their robot aims to treat water and recycle it for farming and drinking.
Participants of the hackathon had to choose a challenge representing the Nasa mission priorities across topics including: ‘Ideate and Create’, ‘Our Ecological Neighbourhood’, ‘Warning! Danger Ahead’, ‘Planetary Blues’ and ‘The Earth and Us’.
‘Team Inspirers’ will now see their space app concept move into the Nasa global judging round.
“We are very excited to have progressed this far and we are very confident. We are now competing against 69 other nations, but that’s about 186 cities, so over 350 other teams will be vying for the Nasa title.” When asked what they thought about the UAE’s ambitions on space exploration, all agreed it was a “very exciting time” for Arab youth.
“Our team is on board with each and every venture the UAE announces. It is so important to care about the space fields and we thank the Arab Youth Venture Foundation and the UAE for what they are doing to champion it.”
For Mahmoud, El-Metwally, Goda, Enbaby and Esmail, if one phrase could help encourage other students to get interested in all things coding and space, it would be this.
“Try to make your own future with coding and try to explore it by knowing all you can about space.”