With the aim of challenging high-school students’ engineering design and problem-solving skills, the LAU School of Engineering (SOE) hosted its annual High School Scholarship Competition, an event that exposes them to the field through hands-on challenges, and rewards outstanding students’ work with LAU scholarships.

“Through this event, we hope to attract the best and brightest to our school, where our ABET-accredited programs and state-of-the-art labs match the ambition of young talents from across the country,” said Dean Michel Khoury.

Assistant Dean and Associate Professor Dani Tannir said that “more than 80 academically excelling high schoolers put their skills to the test, as they engaged in two challenges on March 23 on the Byblos campus.”

The first, he explained, was the Dome-Building Challenge—a physics-based task where the students had to build a dome using basic materials while ensuring that it could withstand heavy loads.

For the second challenge, students learned to program and build an engineering system using the Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) software—a system-design platform for a visual programming language.

Dr. Tannir also pointed out that SOE faculty members assessed the students’ performance following specific criteria, while LAU engineering students helped in organizing the event and guiding the participants.

At the end of the competition, the winners were announced as follows:

• First-place winner, Ali Adul Sater, who had applied to Computer Engineering, earned a 30-percent scholarship.
• Second-place winner, Sarah Hamdar, who had applied to Mechatronics Engineering, earned a 20-percent scholarship.
• Adam Jarrah and Khalil Dandashli won the Dome and LabVIEW challenges, respectively, and earned a 15-percent scholarship, each.
• The best-performing student awards per program went to Andrew Samaha (Electrical Engineering), Dana Nasr (Civil Engineering) and Lana-Maria Lteif (Chemical Engineering), who each earned a 20-percent scholarship.