National STEAM Competition

Imagine an English language and literature class where the students are detectives. Instead of being told what a text means, they investigate it: piecing together character motives, tracing plot clues, building their own case for what a story is about.

Rand Hadieh, Malak Bdeir, Shahd Hadieh, and Hussein Shakarneh, four Bethlehem University students spanning English Education, Interactive Media, and Software Engineering, reimagined what a literature classroom could look like. LitMasters, the platform they built together, just placed first nationally in the “STEAM IT Educational Innovations” competition, ahead of teams from Birzeit University, An-Najah National University, and six other Palestinian universities.

Second place also went to a Bethlehem University team. RoboLab Go is a mobile fabrication lab for elementary grades 1 through 4, built by Bara’ah, Zainab, and Fadi, students spanning Early Childhood Education, Medical Laboratory Sciences, and Sustainable Energy Engineering. It’s inspired by Palestinian cultural heritage: kids design, build, and problem-solve with materials drawn from their own environment, learning computational thinking by making things with their hands.

A third Bethlehem University project, Maqroo’ (“Readable”), rounded out the university’s entries: a digital tool built by Yasmine, Alaa, and Jolien, students in Software Engineering, Arabic Language teaching, and Speech Therapy, to help children with reading difficulties.

All three projects came out of the same idea: that the biggest real-world problems don’t belong to a single department. LitMasters brought together the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Technology, and Engineering. RoboLab Go paired the Faculty of Education with Applied Sciences. Maqroo’ reached furthest of all, combining Applied Sciences, Education, and the Tarek Ahmed Juffali Faculty of Nursing and Health Sciences: three different approaches to the same conviction that better solutions come from collaborating across disciplines and faculties rather than staying inside one.

The “STEAM IT Educational Innovations” competition challenges student teams to identify a real need in education, then solve it by combining disciplines that don’t usually share a classroom. It was organized by the Science Museum at Al-Quds University, in partnership with Palestine’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education and the Belgian Development Agency (Enabel), as part of the Quality Education and Learning project supported by the Belgian Government. Nine Palestinian universities competed this year. Bethlehem University’s teams were supervised by Dr. Georgette Rabadi, Dean of the Faculty of Education, along with Dr. Rabiha Alyan and Dr. Anas Samara.