UAE BARQ برق الإمارات – نبضك
Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications, reiterated the UAE government’s vision, under the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, in adopting advanced technology and coding to innovate new solutions for critical challenges and continue on the development and digitisation journey in the country.
This came during the opening session of the “UAE Codes” day, that included more than 70 events organised by 50 entities across the UAE from 29th to 31st October, aiming to spread coding knowledge, concepts, highlighting talents and digital expertise, and honouring their achievements in the areas of digitisation.
Al Olama said that marking October 29 every year as the “UAE Codes” Day, embodies H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid’s vision on the importance of building the capacities of future generation, and the next talents in coding, which signifies the status of coding in developing government performance and solidifying it as one of the future pillars adopting modern technologies and designing the digital future.
He added that the UAE leadership has long realized the necessity of adopting technology and coding in innovating futuristic solutions and creating opportunities, adding that the UAE depends on proactivity in anticipating the future and providing opportunities that support tech-preneurs to establish their businesses.
Al Olama further states that today’s world doesn’t have illiteracy in not learning how to read or write, instead it represents the importance of keeping pace with digital trends and learning future languages, he emphasised that future will mainly rely on coding to create the most significant changes, integrate advanced technologies and enhance the UAE’s position as a global hub in empowering coding.
The main event of the “UAE Codes” Day celebrations took place in The Museum of the Future, focused on career advice and discussion talks held by experts and coding leaders, namely; Iman Al Shamsi, Chief Digital Advisor at Amazon’s cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, Director of the Al-Cross Center Unit at Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII), Khalid Al Awar, Date scientist in “Talabat” As well as inspirational talks and tips by Murshid Mohammed, founder of DrivU, Hilal Lootah, co-founder of Lune, and Faisal Toukan, co-founder of Ziina.
Several entities have participated in the success of “UAE CODES” through initiatives, programmes, hackathons, and workshops. Emirate’s school establishment, in collaboration with the National Programme for Coders, has organized Hackathons on Emirates towers Boulevard with the participation of 200 students from 50 different schools across the UAE.
The hackathon aims to enhance their technological skills in finding solutions, motivate them to learn to code, and introduce them to the role of coding in developing work models.
Furthermore, Google is celebrating “UAE Codes” Day through a workshop titled; “Cloud Hero, Intro to BigQuery: Analytics & Machine Learning,” presented by Dr. Nabeel Ahmed, GDG Cloud Emirates Organizer, GDG Leeds Organiser, and Director – Training (Google Cloud) at Jellyfish | Cloud Google Developer Expert to gather developers and explore the latest Google Cloud technologies in a friendly gamified learning environment. The Cloud Hero experience aims to help developers fast forward their cloud capabilities by briefing them about Data Analytics Skills, using Google Cloud Skills Boost to play a game of 4 hands-on labs, and competing on the leaderboard to win.Oli Oli will also organize innovative activities that extend over two days to consolidate coding in kids and children from youngest ages, raise their awareness of its importance, attract them to learn coding, and create a new generation of coders and reach the highest number of coders per capita in the world.
Similarly, in University of Sharjah, Colleges of: Computing and Informatics; Science; Engineering, and College of Business at the University of Sharjah celebrated “UAE CODES’ through discussion about several topics, which focus on the importance of coding for engineers, the priority for students to learn leverage coding and future languages, benefits of being a computer scientist, and the necessity of teaching kids coding.
Discussions and competitions aim to increase student’s awareness of coding and discuss its critical role in business growth and computational studies in Physics and Chemistry, which reflect the importance of coding for all fields to ensure sustainability in curriculum development and teaching methods.
