Future Innovators
BY MUNA AL-ALULSamsung Innovation Campus (SIC) is an information, communication and technology (ICT) education initiative offered globally by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the South Korean multinational electronics corporation and one of the world's largest technology companies. King’s Academy is the first school in Jordan to offer the program.
In the first stage of the collaboration, software engineers from Samsung Levant’s Research and Development Center provided training and mentoring to 26 King’s students over the course of a semester. Students worked on developing core competencies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), coding and
programming, in addition to a range of soft skills, guided by their King’s Academy teachers and Samsung mentors.
According to President of Samsung Levant Hendrick Lee, the goal of SIC is to foster talented youth, enhance their employment prospects, and help them gain practical education in technologies.
“We are keen to give opportunities to all people, especially youth, to be involved in the IT industry,” says Lee. “The SIC equips students with the ability to recreate and apply the acquired knowledge, thereby enhancing their competency in the real-life job market and helping students to grow into wellrounded professionals equipped with robust skills that are in high demand.”
Students enrolled in the program represent a diverse cross-section of the student body at King’s Academy, with both female and male students across different grades and nationalities, who also ranged in skill level in the subject matter from beginner to more advanced. To ensure that all students benefited fully from the program, Samsung provided bespoke training to the more advanced students while providing extra support to the beginners.
“Before I joined, I didn’t know anything about Python [a high-level programming language] or how to program a robot or how programming languages work,” says Aisha Aliu ’25, who describes herself as a beginner
Last fall, King’s Academy welcomed an exciting new collaboration with Samsung Electronics Levant that is developing students’ skills in coding, programming and robotics — Samsung Innovation Campus.Students receive awards and certificates at the Samsung Innovation Campus closing ceremony.
at the start of the program, “I’d only done block coding before, I didn’t know we could code from scratch. It was quite challenging, but actually really nice. It wasn’t just learning, it was hands-on physical tasks.”
Taking part in the SIC gave Aliu the confidence to participate in other computer science activities such as the iCode Edu virtual hackathon that took place at the end of the semester, where students worked on solving programming challenges and creating innovative new video game and web designs.
“SIC made me more interested in computer science and encouraged me to learn more, so I even joined the virtual hackathon,” says Aliu. “We used some Python in that, so having experience from SIC really helped me.”
Dana Hammouri ’23 knew she had to join SIC as she could not find computer science internships or learning opportunities in her hometown of Irbid. “I have always been interested in STEM subjects and potentially a career in IT — it’s like an open path, always evolving and developing.”
“When I heard about the program, I knew I had to join because it is a great opportunity for me to gain experience and review Python,” says Hammouri, who had some prior experience in the programming language after taking a Global Online Academy (GOA) course over the summer.
While Brandon Winans ’23 had some robotics experience from his previous school in the United States, Samsung Innovation Campus took it a step further. “I had never taken a computer science course before,” he says. “What’s so great about this course, and King’s, is you can come in with no experience and still learn so much not only from your peers but from the instructors.”
To demonstrate the skills students gained over the course of the semester, an “Escape the Maze” robotics competition was held on the last day of the SIC. Students formed teams to compete in the final competition, where robots they built and programmed were pitted against each other in a race to escape the maze in the shortest amount of time.
Winans’ team’s robot was ultimately the only one that made it out of the maze. “What’s so great about robotics is you come with a perfectly working code and you get there, and nothing works!” he says. “Before we started, we had to redo our code, our timing was all off, our sensors weren’t working, so we had to reconstruct the robot, reprogram it, then throw our robot into the ring and hope it made it out alive. That was the highlight of the whole experience!”
SIC involved a lot of teamwork, according to Ahmad Ali Ahmad ’24, one of the more experienced in the group and who was awarded first place in the program. “I’ve been doing programming all my life, so the mentors gave me some more advanced activities, but it was nice to have that variation between less and more skilled people,” he says. “Our instructors really drove home that if people in the team know something others don’t, we need to make sure everyone in the team understands the concept. Your work doesn’t end when you finish the program, your work ends when everyone in the team knows how the program works and then finishes the program.”
Every person in the team adds something to the work, Hammouri agrees. “Starting from the foundation, we work together to build it up using the different ideas from our team members.”
In addition to the program material, the guidance provided by the four
mentors — all members of the Artificial Intelligence team at Samsung Levant’s Research and Development Center — was “amazing,” according to the participants.
“They have a lot of experience which inspired us,” says Hammouri. “Their presence pushed us to work harder and aim higher for our future careers.”
“They were a wonderful group of instructors,” agrees Syeunghyeok Lee ’24, who was awarded third place in the program. “They would give us more advanced questions usually for people preparing for tech jobs and interviews. We also got to know a lot about other aspects of working in huge tech companies, such as security risks and other insider knowledge.”
Samsung mentor Yahia Daqour was impressed by the King’s students. “Some of them have the ability to take their skills to the market and start implementing them,” he says. “We wanted this program to attract those kids, while teaching the beginners in a way that everyone was satisfied with what they were learning.”
According to Daniel Yu, a senior professional in CSV Communications and Strategy at Samsung Levant, “Our main goal is to support students to get a job in the future, we are not a one-time campaign,” he explains. “We want to motivate students; we want to help them think about innovative approaches to solving problems in order to use that experience in the future to solve problems in the real world.”