Teaching coding to teenagers can be quite an experience

Teaching coding to teenagers can be quite an experience

Last year, I had the opportunity to intern at one of the best tech hubs (Genesys Tech Hub) in the country. It was a very remarkable moment in my life, to my career and future especially.

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Genesys Tech Hub by Anthony Buchi C.

One of the annual programs organized by the hub is the Young Innovators Challenge (YIC) where secondary school students are taught programming from ground zero. This program is aimed at introducing young people into the tech industry at a very young age knowing that the future is mostly about technology.

We were to teach secondary school students in Enugu State programming. 2019 was the second year of the YIC program and the hub decided to make it more interesting, they introduced HTML and CSS. The goal was to get these students to be comfortable using these tools and most importantly to be interested in continuing the learning on their own.

Contact time

We had 4 days, spread across the span of 1 month, that is, 1 day per week. We had 2 hours of contact each week, totaling the contact hours to 8hours in a month.

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Students taking their theory classesImage for post

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Students in a practice session

Curriculum

It wasn’t an easy task and we were to make good use of our time. So a good curriculum was crafted by the organizing team to direct the focus of the tutors. Most of these tutors were Learnable interns.

The curriculum covered HTML and CSS from basics to advance.

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Snapshot of the curriculum

After the curriculum was crafted, we were shared among the number of schools to be taught. The style of teaching was left for the tutors. They were to gather their teaching materials and every other thing needed to make the students understand what was being taught:

Learning Resources

· Solo learn App

· Freecodecamp.org

· Internetingishard.com

· YouTube Tutorials

· Free Udemy Courses on HTML and CSS, etc.

During the 2 hours contact, the tutors were to teach the theory in 1 hour and use the remaining hour for practical.

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Joshua Nwankwo and IFUNANYA CHARITY doing the Lord’s work

Challenges faced

One of the biggest challenges was that some of the schools didn’t have computer labs, so we had to improvise. To some, we gave a coding test which helped in identifying the most interested students and we brought along our private laptops for the practical. For others, we wrote the codes on the board and they were asked to run the code on their laptops when they got home. Suffice to say that it wasn’t easy.

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So… Who was the best school?

An inter-school competition was set up and all the schools that participated were to compete for a prize. This also helped in motivating the students to learn and practice on their own. Learning activities were carried out in four weeks and, after that, a date was set for the competition. The competition was very much important to us because it was our own way of measuring their progress, and ours too.

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YIC Grand Finale

On the day of the competition, we had two representatives from each school, probably the most interested students. They were tested in 2 categories — theoretical questions (to be answered orally) and practicals.

The practicals, which was the most important part, came first. They were asked to build a two-page website, using HTML and CSS; the Figma link to the design could be found there. They had two hours to collaborate and reproduce that same design using HTML and CSS. It’s also important to note that there was a quick recap, just to bring all the students on the same page.

A winner emerged after the second part of the competition (oral quiz). The representing students went home with brand new Dell laptops for each of them. Also, a consolation prize for the second and the third position.

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University of Nigeria Secondary School Enugu campus were 1stImage for post

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Command Secondary school came in 2ndImage for post

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Seat of Wisdom school were second runners

Teachers and the other attendees went home with consolation prizes in addition to a tour around the facility and a visit to the VR lab.

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Ah yes, the students played VR games!

The day ended with some refreshments and lots of pictures.

Being part of this program was a great experience for me, here are some things I learned:

  1. Anybody can learn anything. Most of these students didn’t have prior knowledge of programming. They were brought up from ground zero. So yes, as Nwangwu Ositadinma would always say, “Everything is indeed learnable.”
  2. We have really smart kids on the block. Having lived all my life in the South-East and having attended both State and Federal Government-owned secondary schools, I must say that I was surprised at the smartness I saw on the first day.
  3. There is no excuse for not learning. Most of these students didn’t have access to a computer or internet, especially those in the state government-owned schools, but they worked really hard and from their results at the competition, they really did amazing jobs.
  4. A solid foundation is EVERYTHING! It was our maximum focus on the basics and hands-on practice that helped the students in continuing their learning on their own.

I really think it is important that this model should be replicated around the hubs in all the Geopolitical zones in Nigeria. A shift to a diversified economy is the responsibility of every sector, and introducing technology to secondary school students is the right step in the right direction.

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