Fostering youths’ ambitions for science

The other day I had the honor of being among a panel of judges for the Science & Engineering Fair 2013 at Effat University. The theme was renewable energy.
The overriding focus on the event was to encourage high school students to pursue science and create an environment that encourage that pursuit. Saudi Arabia has always been keen on its young people forging careers in science, technology, computer science and engineering. But renewable energy is something new to us and rather difficult for the average Saudi to embrace.
Not too long ago the government came out with plans to encourage its citizens to use energy-saving light bulbs. But the people I know rejected the effort, saying they didn’t like the way the lights looked. They didn’t take into consideration that energy-saving light bulbs, and whether it gives off the light people want, is not really about them or their likes and dislikes. It’s about saving energy and not being so wasteful. Yet in the land where electricity is so cheap, there is no urgency to change the way we live.
Effat, though, likes to think out of the box and recognizes the necessity of using technology that not only saves energy but makes our lives easier at the same time.
At the Science & Engineering Fair I came across a young girl who developed a series of solar panels that regulated energy better to become more sufficient, less costly, but also provided enough energy to be of practical use. She had hoped that a government establishment would take interest in it and serve as a leader in the field of solar energy.
Another project by a young woman featured more or less an electronic pharmacy that would serve to aid the elderly and disabled. She invented a device with a bar code. An elderly or blind patient may not remember or can read the vital information on a prescription. The device reads the bar code and then provides the data of what type of medicine the patient has, its recommended dosage and how many times during the day the medicine needs to be taken. The student hopes to develop a mobile device. One student is single-handedly attempting to resolve the parking crisis in Jeddah, which has an abundance of cars, poor and rude drivers, but a dearth of parking spaces. And when we find a car space to park, we find that another motorist had decided he needed two spaces to park his Mini Cooper. The student proposes to organize parking lots by using two sensors between the two lines. Unless the cars’ tires are on the sensor between the two lines a gate will not open. The vehicle must be in the right position.
These kinds of ideas are being developed by 16- and 17-year-old girls, who are first and foremost thinking about solutions for their future. Saudi Arabia is a consuming society and expends considerable energy while failing to give much in return. We rarely consider the alternatives. Look how long it took us to introduce separate bins for recycling paper, plastic and bottles. And the jury is still out — just like the light bulb experiment — on whether the public will accept recycling as part of our daily rituals.
If teenagers still in high school can come up with some of the fascinating inventions that I have seen at Effat’s fair, imagine what they could do after earning their postgraduate degrees. But to get there, we need private organizations, the leading businesses in Saudi Arabia, to take on in their social responsibility programs to encourage high school students to pursue science in the renewable energy field.
Other universities would benefit by joining the private sector and Effat University in fostering an environment were young people can be challenged to produce more of the exceptional examples of technology that I witnessed as a judge.

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