Dr. Tarek Kamel, minister of Communications and Information Technology, Dr. Essam Sharaf, minister of Transport, General Mohammed Abdel Salam El-Mahgoub, governor of Alexandria, and Dr. Gamal Eldin Mokhtar, president of the Arab Academy for Science and Technology, attended the closing ceremony and award distribution of the third Egyptian Olympiad in Informatics (EOI)held under the auspices of MCIT in cooperation with the Arab Academy for Science and Technology from 21 to 27 August, 2005.

The EOI is a competition in IT and programming and aims at discovering young talents and motivating them to find IT oriented solutions to problems.

The competition’s registration rules stipulate the contestants age from 6 to 20 and have basic IT skills. The selection process was held in the IT Clubs sponsored by MCIT, which count to 1,200 clubs across the nation, and 90 contestants were selected out of 3,500 applicants coming from 19 governorates.

MCIT sponsors a number of ICT training programs offered in IT Clubs, which are considered one of the most important projects of the Human Resource Development department at MCIT.

On the sidelines of the official competition, a contest for 40 children was held to establish communications between Egyptian children and their counterparts to achieve development and encourage young talents. Another contest for 30 contestants with special needs, primarily those with learning difficulties, visual impairment and hear and speech impairment, was held. A contest in Robotics was held for 10 contestants in addition to a contest entitled "Future Programmers", organized by the Information Technology Institute (ITI), where 12 contesters won.

All contesters have undergone intensive training sessions followed by another round of selection and further training in IT Clubs to qualify for participating in the competition.