KARACHI, Jan 10: It was yet another eventful day of the International Schools Educational Olympiad, involving over 300 students and teachers as contestants, at a local hotel on Thursday.

Apart from students and teachers who showed utmost enthusiasm while taking part in different events including scientific and technological displays, panel discussion, Urdu songs competition, film-making and web-page presentation, there were also hundreds of other students, teachers and personalities belonging to various walks of life to witness and applause the promising youngsters.

In all, 17 school teams had put on display their working models that had been constructed in advance by choosing one of the two topics given by the organizers — a model room for future or a working and moving robot. Two students from each school, along with their team leader, were explaining and displaying the functioning of their models to visitors and to the judges.

Most of the students showed interest, among others, in two models presented by Karachi Grammar School (The Venturer) and Saint Patrick’s High School (The Amaranth-room of the future in space). The KGS’ team, which won the first prize in the 2nd ISEO Olympiad, mentioned that their’s was a prototype model for the first of the five landing modules for the Venturer project designed to explore the Mars and help create a stable, inhabitable environment there.

The ISEO also provided opportunities to teachers, who accompanied their students competing in different events, to refresh their skills by taking part in a panel discussion conducted in English. Judgments were based on content, relevance, arguments, confidence, clarity of language and expression.

About 25 schoolteachers took part in the discussion encompassing politics, human resource development, education, science and technology, standard of living, population, religion and defence capabilities of the country.