Participants at the workshop with members of the Computer Science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.

DOHA • Teachers from 30 middle schools and high schools in Qatar attended CS4Qatar, a new programme offered by the Computer Science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.

The three-day professional development workshop, held over the week end, was tailored to reach out to technology, math and computer science teachers in local high schools and middle schools.

The workshop, which is part of a series of outreach events Carnegie Mellon Qatar is planning, was comprised of seminars on three topics. The first session was "computer science unplugged: how to teach and learn computer science without programming."

The second day was devoted solely to Alice, an object-based, 3-D graphics authoring environment used to teach computer programming principles to students in middle school and high school. The workshop concluded with a day-long seminar on Java, an object-oriented programming language that is widely used in introductory courses in programming and computer science.

Qatar Science & Technology Park offered a $5,000 sponsorship of the event. The money was used to purchase five laptop computers. The computers were raffled off at the end of the event by Ben Figgis, QSTP Marketing Manager.