The National Olympiad for Programming and Artificial Intelligence (ATHKA), organised over several months by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, in partnership with the King Abdulaziz and His Companions Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity (Mawhiba) and the Ministry of Education, aspired to “nurture a promising generation of Saudi school students from intermediate and secondary levels, totalling approximately three million across various regions and governorates of the Kingdom, in the fields of programming and artificial intelligence.”
Created to enhance the global competitiveness of the current generation to help achieve the objectives of the Human Capacity Development Program, part of Saudi Vision 2030, the final round of the competition was held from 23-27 April in Riyadh. Five students from the secondary level and five students from the intermediate level were awarded gold medals in the Olympiad.
Five students from the secondary level and five students from the intermediate level were awarded gold medals
Eleven students from the secondary level and 10 from the intermediate level received silver medals, while 19 secondary students and 20 intermediate students earned bronze. A total of 298 students competed in the final stage after qualifying from a pool of 260,000 Saudi students from across the Kingdom.
A statement from the SPA explained that the Olympiad was designed to find “outstanding school students skilled in computational thinking to analyse and solve algorithmic programming challenges. This step would help them enter the field of AI and encourage them to develop computational thinking skills, design AI-based algorithms, and recognise these skills as essential for learning in the 21st century.”