The Africa Teen Geeks 2017 Festival of Code was a roaring success as students came together to compete in the exciting tournament.
The annual festival is also an event that gives learners the opportunity to learn to code, paired with Unisa. The African Teen Geeks is a non-profit organisation provides computer science training in schools and in under-served communities. Computer science is generally not taught as a standard in African schools due to a lack of resources and the current computer curriculum focuses on how to use software, but gives no insight into how software is made.
The event was a thrilling affair as children from age six to 19 years from Belfast in Mpumalanga, the Florida Unisa Campus and the Sunnyside Unisa Campus attended the five-day work workshop where prominent figures addressed the students. Entrepreneurship, business planning and website development, developing apps, and robotics were the subjects of the event. The final day consisted of the judges rotating among the ten groups of learners as they worked on sales pitches using a business plan, website and app.
Unisa School of Computing lecturer, Ronell van der Merwe, explained the partnership between Unisa and Africa Teen Geeks.
“Unisa became a part of this initiative as part of the School of Computing at Unisa and our main partnership with Africa Teen Geeks is to get coding out in to the world and to as many kids as soon as possible. This is where Africa Teen Geeks came in – they invited us to become a part of the initiative. Unisa has lots of computer labs across the country and we felt that it would be a good idea to join the Geeks. The learners have been attending every Saturday from the start of the year, receiving coding lessons from Africa Teen Geeks. There are different initiatives during the course of the year where they get together and have special events like a Hack-a-Thon and the Festival of Code.”
Ronell said the main objectives of the programme are to have students who will not be technologically challenged and are prepared for further education studies.
“What we get out of this programme is students who are confidently computer literate and technology enabled at a university level.
We also get kids that are ready to study on their own because Teen Geeks trains them to work on their own when given a set of problems to solve. In the end, the programme prepares the students for future studies”.
Africa Group IT and Florida Campus Mentor, Mel Govender, said Africa Teen Geeks wanted to change a few things in this year’s workshop and they have taught skills to the children as the year concludes.
“This year we changed it up a bit. We actually wanted to give our kids a sense of ‘now that we’ve coded, what else can we do?’, so we focused a lot on business acumen, entrepreneurship, how to create a business plan, how to create an app to promote your business, how to create a website for your business, presentation skills, and how to sell your business. The overall winners of the presentation of app, website and business plan at the end of the workshop will have their concept developed to the next level.”
“We thought it was important for us to give our kids a sense of purpose and understanding, and that no matter where you come from, or what your circumstances are, there’s nothing that can stop you from being whatever you want to be. Also, one of the changes we made this year is mixing three of our groups, which we brought together in different teams to brainstorm ideas. We have been successful in getting the children involved and due to our programme, a number of kids have received their Oracle certification,” said Mel.
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