FOUR INITIATIVES THAT ARE GETTING NIGERIAN CHILDREN INTO TECH

W.TEC Girls Technology Camp

The Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre is a Nigerian non-governmental organization that works to empower young girls economically and socially by helping them acquire technology skills. W.TEC recently held its 6th Girls Technology Camp last August. And yes, they’ve been hosting these annual camp events for the past six years. Girls between the ages of 11 and 17 learn to create digital content, build websites and develop applications. W.TEC is a non-profit, and relies on donations from the public and corporate sponsors.
                                                      Audax Codeschools

On most days, Audax is a regular IT consulting company. But a few weeks ago, the company converted its facilities into a code school targeted at parents who want their kids to pick up basic IT and programming skills early on. For a 3-week duration, the enrolled children were taken through website building basics via HTML and CSS, and were taught game and mobile app development with elementary frameworks like Scratch and App Inventor.

                                                         Exposure Robotics League

These guys have an interesting back to front way of teaching kids to use computers. They show them how to program robots in an intense five-week training session.

Exposure Robotics league is an MIT student founded group led by Obinna Ukwuani. Ukwuani experienced two years of Nigerian education before he left for the US. Now he and his team hope they can make a difference in the lives of Nigerian kids via world class robotics education that not only teaches programming and other related academic principles, but also encourages creativity and the imaginative application of the engineering principles the children learn in the classroom.

                                                        CcHub Bot Club

The Co-Creation Hub has a program for kids that is uncannily like the Kids’ Hacker Camp that Erik described in his post. Only that the one at CcHub has been going on for the past two months. TheCcHub Bot Club convenes twice a week with just under two dozen kids in attendance.

It started with Vanso donating a bunch of Lego Mindstorms. Then CcHub staff went around secondary schools in the area showing the teachers and kids how robots work and inviting them to sign up to a three month robotics programming training session. The sixteen kids that were eventually selected come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for theory sessions with instructors and practical sessions where they get to work with the tools.