I am 16 years old, I'm in school and I like designing and engineering in general. But before hearing about the innovation labs my ideas, hobbies and ambitions were different. I liked video games, and I wanted to be a nurse in the future and to enjoy working and helping others.
But this did not last after I learned about the labs and participated in several courses. In the first course, we created a video game - we started by designing and then programming. At that point everything changed, I felt that programming and computers were really interesting, contrary to what I had known elsewhere. I loved programming, I even attended the course many hours before the actual start time to see our trainer and how he worked. I spent all my time working hard and felt so much excitement., I even taught my classmate and learned from her.
Later, I participated in another computer course, but it was more difficult, as it was about the history and technical names, which were a little difficult to memorize This changed my point of view about computers, and I realized that everything has two sides: one that is entertaining and the other that is boring or inflexible.
I used all my time in the labs to do something nice and to change the way my school friends thought about computers - that they are boring. I taught all the students in my class how to disconnect the computer parts and it was an amazing experience, which worked in a positive way to change my friend's point of view.
I did not stop here, I participated in another course, which was about programming and it was funny and tough, and we learned all the English codes, which helped me a lot. At the end of the course we made a car that runs and stops if intercepted by a barrier and changes its way. It was amazing that I was the only girl in that session and I was the only girl working in this field here in the labs - programming and designing robots by myself. This was a very special thing for me and I was proud of everything - even the annoying mistakes I made and all the time they took to fix. It was so enjoyable to see that what I had made is moving finally.
Then I entered a competition with my brother and it was so beautiful when we won in the first and second stages - but we didn't complete the third stage. After that I entered another competition about robots and we were training every week over the course of two months. We were working hard and the most important thing was that all the things we've learned we then taught and shared with all the other centres in other governorates because we were a team of five people from five governorates. We were meeting and working together every week and again I was the only girl.
My advice to all girls is that the road to success will have many challenges, but here you have to show your strength and to break the challenges with the force of will that you’ve got.
