Send Elia & Jason to the World Robot Olympiad
There is one rule the boys built into their machine and refused to change.
When the August 4 explosion plays, the port flashes exactly once. It never loops. The wave of light spreads across Beirut the way it really did, in a circle, and then it stops.
Elia is 10. Jason is 11. They decided, on their own, that you do not get to watch that flash twice.
What they built:
Lumen is a machine that turns data into light.
A printed world map lies flat on a table. Standing on top of it are five tall columns of light, thirty-five small screens in total, driven by six Arduinos: one conductor and five players, talking to each other over two wires.
Press a button and history starts moving in front of you. How high a point of light sits on a column tells you its latitude. The dark gaps between the columns are the ocean, so you feel the distance a thing had to travel. Swap the paper map underneath and the same five columns stop showing the whole world and start showing a single city.
That city, for the dataset they care about most, is Beirut.
Why light?
Their starting point was a phrase everyone repeats: data is the new oil. The boys pointed out the part people skip. You cannot pour crude oil into a car. Somebody has to refine it first, and nobody has been refining our history.
Then they found the research. Psychologists call it the picture superiority effect: show a person thousands of images once, and they will still recognize them later. Words fade. Pictures stay.
So Elia and Jason stopped trying to explain data and started showing it.
Five stories, told in light:
1) August 4, 2020. The map becomes their city. One flash. One time.
2) Where our alphabet went. Three thousand years ago, sailors from Tyre, Sidon and Beirut carried something west across the sea. Not gold. An alphabet. On Lumen, the light starts at home and spreads until every column is glowing, because those letters became Greek, then Latin, then Arabic. They are the letters you are reading right now. Lebanon has exported light before.
3) The Silk Road. A caravan of light crossing column to column, east to west, along the route the traders actually walked.
4) A pandemic you can read. Six million deaths is a number too large to feel, so they turned it into rising bars of light by continent. Cases lead in Asia and Europe. Deaths climb highest in the Americas. Same event, different story, understood in a second.
5) One moment, five clocks. The same instant is a different hour on every meridian, so each column keeps its own local time and a line of daylight sweeps across as the world turns.
This is not a school science fair:
The World Robot Olympiad publishes an official brief every year, and every team on earth builds against the same one. The 2026 theme is Robots Meet Culture, and one of its three areas asks a specific question: museums and monuments can show you the past, but can a robot make you feel it?
Elia and Jason answered that question with five columns of light. Not with a screen, not with an app, but with something physical you stand in front of and watch move.
The brief also asks for an orchestra: not one robot doing one job, but several working in coordination to tell a story through motion and light. Lumen is six microcontrollers, one conductor and five players, synchronized over two wires.
And the judging criteria ask teams to show respect for cultural authenticity. Two children decided that the flash at the port plays once and never repeats, before anyone told them that was something they would be marked on. Some things you cannot teach.
Who they are:
Elia Saber, 10, Louaize School. Jason Soujaa, 11, Saint Joseph School. Team Innovative Ninja Coders.
They won first place in Lebanon's national competition and earned the right to represent Lebanon at the World Robot Olympiad International Final in Puerto Rico, December 2026, in the Future Innovators category, Elementary age group. They are competing under Area 3 of this year's theme, Experiencing Art and History with Robots, and their project connects to two UN Sustainable Development Goals: Quality Education, and Sustainable Cities and Communities.
I'm Charbel Daoud, their coach. I have spent over 10 years mentoring young people in robotics and coding, and I am currently a PhD candidate in artificial intelligence. That matters here for one reason: I know what these boys have built is not a toy, and I know exactly how far it can still go. Jad Daoud coaches alongside me and was on site with the boys through the competition. When you are eleven years old explaining a soldered circuit to international judges in your third language, having someone in the room who knows the project as well as you do is the difference between freezing and finishing.
This is our third time carrying the flag:
In 2022 we represented Lebanon in Germany and finished in the top 20 in the world. In 2023 we went to Panama. Puerto Rico is our third international final, and by far our youngest team.
Lebanon does not send children to world championships easily. There is no federation writing the checks, no sponsor covering the flights, no ministry underwriting the trip. Every single time, it comes down to whether enough people decide it's worth it.
What we need:
Total goal: $28,000
That covers:
-> Round-trip flights, Beirut to Puerto Rico
-> WRO international registration fees
-> Nights of Accommodation
-> Food and Ground transport during the competition week
-> A custom protective case and transport for Lumen: 30 x 45 x 20 cm and about 5 kg of hand-soldered columns, screens and wiring
-> Booth design, build and preparation. At WRO, Future Innovators teams present at their own stand for the whole competition. That means the printed maps, the base the columns stand on, banners, signage, the poster, team shirts, and everything a visitor sees before Elia and Jason say a word. It is a real cost and it is the difference between a project on a table and a project people stop for.
-> Spare components, because things break in transit, and materials for the months of preparation before the flight
What your donation actually buys:
A shot at the stage.
In Germany we finished in the top 20 in the world. Top 20 is close enough to see the podium from where you are standing, and far enough to know exactly what it would take to get there. We have spent every year since working that out.
This time we are bringing an 11 year old and a 12 year old with a project nobody else thought of. So what your donation buys is a real possibility: that at the closing ceremony in Puerto Rico, in front of teams from across the world, the name called out is Lebanon, and the two people who walk up to collect it are children from Beirut.
We cannot promise that. Nobody can. But it cannot happen at all if they are not in the room.
And whether or not they win, here is what every person who walks past their table will see: a printed map, five columns of light, one flash at a port, and a wave moving outward across a city the world has mostly stopped thinking about.
Elia and Jason have not stopped thinking about it. That is the entire point.
If you can't donate:
Share this with one person. A share costs nothing and it has funded more of these trips than you would believe.
To everyone who gave in 2022 and 2023: you are the reason there is a 2026. Those students are still building, and some are studying engineering now. This is what it compounds into.
شكراً. Thank you.
Charbel Daoud and Jad Daoud Coaches, Team Innovative Ninja Coders
