Evotel sponsors Krugersdorp High School computer labs
Evotel continues its education initiative by providing computers.
Fibre Network Operator (FNO) Evotel, once again showed its commitment and dedication towards educating the youth of South Africa through its sponsorship of the setup and running of Krugersdorp High School’s (KHS) Robotics and Coding labs.
The government, through the Department of Basic Education, realised the importance of incorporating robotics and coding as part of the country’s technology education curriculum and is working towards establishing it as a subject for grade eight and nine learners within the standard basic education curriculum by 2024 and 2025.
According to the school’s market head, Lauren Jooste-Coetsee, KHS has started preparations well in advance and built three computer labs at the school that will accommodate a total of 90 learners, each with a PC. The school is in the process of training six teachers and a Head of Department and aims to start the programme officially during the third term.
“The training of the teachers and the current subject curriculum will be supplied by local education services provider Resolute Education, who has done a lot of development in this field. Resolute Education is a facilitator and has created its own curriculum. They will be giving training and licenses to the school so that we can teach robotics and coding,” adds Lauren.
Evotel believes that robotics and coding subjects should have been introduced far sooner into the basic education curriculum. General manager of the operator, Bradley Bekker explains the importance of introducing these subjects and how robotics can improve education.
“The fact that it guides learners towards critical thinking and problem-solving as well as promoting collaboration and creativity within today’s digital age should have been part of youth education for more than 20 years already, so we are very happy that things are changing, and we are all too happy to contribute to the rapid developments taking place right now,” he said.
Recently the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study survey found that only 19% of South Africa’s grade four learners can read for meaning, which is very worrying.
“It shows just how much more needs to be done to properly educate South Africa’s youth.
“At Evotel, we will continue to ramp up our efforts towards youth education. Over and above already offering free internet access to all the schools that fall under our network and the access we provide schools to learning material as part of our partnership with the learning organisation, we will investigate other ways to contribute to youth education, like the sponsorship of the KHS Robotics and Coding initiative,” Bradley concludes.
