Samsun University Rector Prof. Dr. Mahmut Aydın wrote about TEKNOFEST's contribution to the human resources trained in line with Türkiye's goal of technological independence for AA Analysis.
The technological future of a country is determined by its people's confidence in their own minds and ability to produce, rather than its factories and laboratories. For this reason, seeing TEKNOFEST as just a technology festival would be overlooking its real meaning for Türkiye. The most important achievement of TEKNOFEST is that it changes the way our young people look at technology. For many years, the first question that came to our minds when it came to critical technologies was: "Where can we get this?" The TEKNOFEST generation now asks "Why shouldn't we do this?" or even "How can we do this better?" He asks questions. This paradigm shift is the transition from a consuming society to a producing society, in other words, a revolution in self-confidence and mentality. The name of this transformation is the National Technology Move, and its horizon is the Red Apple ideal that has lived in the memory of these lands for a century.
Red Apple: The ideal that is re-established as it is reached
Red apple represents more than a geographical target in the history of Turkish thought, but an ideal that has been on the horizon for centuries. This is what Ziya Gökalp calls "ideal": The ideal that motivates a nation and unites its members for a common goal. What makes Red Apple special is that every goal achieved is not the finish line, but becomes the starting point of a new goal. It is not a coincidence that this ancient concept is the name of Türkiye's first unmanned warplane. KIZILELMA made its first flight in 2022. In 2025, it performed autonomous shooting at a target beyond vision and achieved autonomous close-arm flight, a world first, with two unmanned warplanes. As of 2026, it is about to enter the inventory. But what really matters is the mentality that makes this plane possible. The engineers who designed RED APPLE grew up in a culture that said "we can do this too". The most broad-based school of this culture today is TEKNOFEST.
National Technology Move: The new name of independence
The National Technology Move is the will to transform from a country that purchases critical technologies from abroad into a country that designs, produces and exports them. Strategies show the direction, but it is the person who will walk that path. A technology can be purchased, a factory can be established in a few years, but a generation that can produce technology cannot exist without being raised with patience and effort. This is exactly the place of TEKNOFEST in this move. It started as a festival in 2018, and today it has turned into the human resources infrastructure of the move. 1 million 600 thousand competitors and 730 thousand teams applied to TEKNOFEST 2026 competitions from 54 areas, 81 provinces and 97 countries.
"I Can Do" feeling and project culture
You can teach a teenager to use the most advanced technology, but it is difficult to talk about technological independence if he does not believe that he can develop a new technology. Young people at TEKNOFEST not only watch rockets, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electric vehicles and artificial intelligence applications; they design, code, produce and test them. When the rocket doesn't fly, they redesign it, and when the algorithm doesn't work, they rewrite the code. The cycle of learning from failure and trying again gives them the feeling of "I can do it", which is the real reward of TEKNOFEST.
The second big gain is the spread of the project culture. The student, who recognizes the problem, forms a team, designs a solution and tests the result, ceases to be a passive recipient of information and becomes a subject that produces information. The fact that the festival is held in Şanlıurfa in 2026 shows that this culture has spread all over Anatolia. Because the National Technology Move becomes a truly national move when the claim to produce technology goes beyond the monopoly of a few centers and reaches every corner of the country.
A generation rising from Anatolia
One of the most striking indicators of this spread is the young students of Anatolian universities that are the same age as TEKNOFEST. Teams from newly established campuses participated in the first festival in 2018. These teams returned with success with the rockets they developed in a few months. These young people, who named their rockets after Anatolian rivers, did not think of technology as separate from the identity of the geography in which they lived. They could have said, "Let our laboratories be completed first, then we'll see," but they chose to produce, not wait. This is the attitude at the core of the National Technology Move: Instead of waiting for the conditions to mature, to mature the conditions by producing them.
These successes were not a one-time event. The successes of rocket teams were followed by electric vehicle, Hyperloop, UAV, artificial intelligence and jet engine teams; It has become commonplace for hundreds of teams from a single campus to participate in competitions. At TEKNOFEST 2026, the teams from these campuses reached Türkiye's first places and podium places in the most challenging categories. There are tens of thousands of lines of unique code and countless flight tests behind the system, which is the first in combat UAV. The problem these students were tackling—detecting and tracking an airborne target without human intervention—is the same problem solved today by the engineers developing RED APPLE.
First place is the result; Thousands of lines of code written, the will to start over after unsuccessful tests and the self-confidence that "we can do this" are the real gain.
The most valuable person is an educated person
The student who builds a rocket doesn't just learn how to build a rocket; He also learns to break down the problem into parts, manage resources, make decisions under pressure, and start over after failure. Many young people from the first TEKNOFEST generation are today working in R&D and production fields in defense industry and aerospace companies. The fact that a young man who built a rocket in the competition area became a member of the engineer team of the national missile and unmanned aircraft projects a few years later summarizes how the National Technology Move works. The links of the chain that makes KIZILELMA fly are being shaped in a high school workshop, a university team, and a TEKNOFEST track.
From prototype to corporate capacity
Each threshold reached creates a new responsibility. Today, the project culture survives largely through the sacrifices of volunteer academics and students; Many highly successful prototypes are shelved as soon as the festival ends. Three steps stand out for this energy to transform into a permanent capacity. First, team mentoring is reflected in academic incentive and promotion criteria. Secondly, TEKNOFEST projects are recognized as graduation projects, internships and course credits. Thirdly, directing the successful projects to technopark incubation programs and industrial partnerships. The move deepens to the extent that the young person who produces prototypes can turn into a young person founding a company.
The road to Kızılelma
The issue is not that all young people are building rockets or UAVs. The point is, when faced with a problem, "Who will solve this?" Instead of waiting, "How can I contribute to the solution of this?" The aim is to raise a generation that takes action by saying: TEKNOFEST is a long-term human resources investment that raises this generation; We will see its fruits much more clearly in our science and industry ecosystem in the next 10 to 20 years.
The stories that started with a few rockets and UAVs on the campuses of Anatolia's young universities and reached first place in the most challenging categories in eight years are true mirrors of this big picture. The road to Kızılelma also passes along the banks of Anatolian rivers.
Rockets, UAVs and degrees are the visible achievements of TEKNOFEST. The biggest gain is the "I can do" awareness that is engraved in the minds of our young people. The social equivalent of this consciousness is echoed in the following sentence, which forms the essence of the National Technology Move: "We can do it; we can do it the best."
As a result, ideals become reality only when they find a generation that shoulders them. The flag of Nuri Killigil, Vecihi Hürkuş, Nuri Demirağ and Özdemir Bayraktar, who established factories, designed airplanes and said "we can do it too" in the face of impossibilities, is now in the hands of young people. In the footsteps of these pioneers, the TEKNOFEST generation is walking with determined steps on the road to Kızılelma with the ideal of "Fully Independent and Strong Türkiye".
