We’re excited to share the remarkable journey of transforming education through AI innovation by Hiba Bou Ajram, the 21st Century Learning Coordinator at EMS Doha - work that's now being scaled across an entire school network.
The Challenge
EMS is far from your average school. With over 1,000 secondary and a 1000 primary students in a bustling international environment that's part of a larger school network, Hiba faced a perfect storm of challenges that many educational technology coordinators will recognise:
The Time Crunch Reality: As someone responsible for upskilling educators and introducing AI across multiple departments, she needed solutions that could work within the constraints of busy school schedules and competing priorities.
The Multi-Language, Multi-Cultural Challenge: EMS serves a diverse international student body (mostly Arabic-speaking but international) following the Cambridge IGCSE curriculum. Supporting effective teaching and learning across English, Arabic, and French while maintaining academic standards required sophisticated solutions that could bridge language and cultural gaps.
The Scale vs. Personal Touch Dilemma: With such a large student population, providing personalised guidance for critical decisions like IGCSE subject selection was becoming impossible. "Students are lost at that point and parents as well," Hiba noted about the March deadline when Year 9 students must choose their subjects for the following year.
How Mindjoy Partners with EMS Doha
Mindjoy provided EMS Doha with the tools to transform their innovative ideas into scalable solutions that could work across languages, departments, and even school networks:
Customisable AI Tutors: Teachers created specialised tutors for different needs - from helping students navigate IGCSE subject choices to supporting with lesson planning. Each tutor was tailored with specific personalities, knowledge base enhancements, and guardrails.
Knowledge Base Integration: The platform allows educators to upload comprehensive resources - syllabi, Cambridge materials, school calendars, university advisor presentations - creating informed AI assistants that provide accurate, context-specific guidance.
Multilingual Capabilities: Support for Arabic, English, and French enables truly inclusive education where language barriers don't limit learning opportunities.
Smart Safety Features: Built-in content moderation and redirect capabilities ensure students stay on-topic and receive appropriate guidance, even when they try to test boundaries.
Actionable Insights: Detailed analytics help educators understand how students interact with AI tutors, identifying engagement patterns and areas where additional support might be needed.
Impact
The transformation at EMS has been remarkable, with Hiba's work now serving as a model for other schools in their network:
Student Guidance at Scale
Hiba created an IGCSE subject selection tutor that asks students about their future aspirations and guides them through the decision-making process using comprehensive knowledge bases with Cambridge materials and university guidance. This has transformed a resource-intensive counseling bottleneck into an accessible, always-available support system.
Educator Empowerment Across Departments
Teachers across subjects - from Islamic studies to Business to Art - are now creating their own specialised AI tutors. "It's nice to see how teachers use it and the personalities that they assign," Hiba observed. What started as a small teacher AI committee has grown into department-wide adoption with tailored lesson plan creators for each subject area.
Creative Professional Development
Hiba and her team hosted four professional development (PD) sessions titled “Unlocking Classroom Potential with Rosenshine and Mindjoy.” We introduced Mindjoy Pathways through a creative and interactive approach: teachers became students with the task to make playdough by completing a Mindjoy Pathway. This course was specifically designed using Rosenshine’s Principles to demonstrate how these strategies can foster deeper learning and engagement. Another example of Hiba’s creativity is their "Meet the Aliens PD" digital escape room using Mindjoy as part of a multi-tool challenge where teachers had to crack codes by communicating with French-speaking Tutors. This hands-on approach helped non-French-speaking teachers discover the platform's multilingual capabilities while having fun.
Student-Led Innovation
Hiba has established a student AI committee where students test new features and provide feedback. "You're amazed by the ideas that they give you on how they can use AI," she shared. Students start by testing boundaries but quickly move to constructive suggestions for educational applications.
