Nakimera, an eighth-grader in Luweero, Uganda eagerly points at the screen and shreaks – The javascript snippet she tediously typed into her html website works! She’s in one of a classes at Kasiiso Secondary School, selected to take part in the coding pilot offered by CodeJIKA to 50 secondary schools in the country.
By training university students to be “Code Coaches” tens of thousands of learners and hundreds of teachers have been impacted in Uganda alone. From Ghana to Kenya and down to South Africa, CodeJIKA’s home country, the same scenario plays out daily, as youth get irreversibly hooked on the power of code to build and create.
In South Africa, Tangible Africa’s mobile coding had a breakout year with large-scale teacher training in partnership with Teacher’s Unions and civil society organizations throughout the provinces. And what greater way to cap this successes than with an Hour of Code during the Computer Science Education Week from the 5-11 of December 2022.
“Every student should have the opportunity to study Computer Science” that is the premise of the week-long celebration and the famous “Hour of Code” campaign that popularized it.
How to Get Involved during Computer Science Week
Whether you are new to coding or interested in exploring the world of computer science, we encourage high school students and teachers to do an hour of code, by selecting one or all of the activities we have lined up for CSEdWeek.
- Beginners: Start by trying out the 5-Minute Website on your phone on CodeJIKA.org
- Intermediate: Try Project 1-3
- Advanced: If you are looking for a challenge, try Project 4, it creates an incredible javascript game.
- Certificates are automatically generated on the platform for those who complete the activities mentioned above.
HourofCode.com has a wonderful range of online free activities for classes and children. To learn more about what is happening locally one can visit https://codejika.org/csed-week/
Trends for Coding in Schools in Africa
While Africa lagged for many years, the progress in 2022 shows enormous appetite and faster uptake than expected. Many secondary education core curriculums around the continent now include HTML, a pre-cursor to learning functional programming like Javascript or python.
African-born coding solutions like CodeJIKA’s “Offline Web Development for Teens” and Tangible Africa’s free “Offline mobile game TANKS” are reaching record numbers throughout South Africa and have created waves in a dozen other African countries. Tangible Africa recently scooped the runner-up prize with the African Union while CodeJIKA was a finalist at ITTPSA’s Social Impact Award.
The reach of these free, mobile friendly and offline solutions are growing exponentially while the annual awareness stalwart, Africa Code Week which launched in 2015 continues to provide the exposure needed for governments to take action and accelerate curricular inclusion for these topics.
While policy and curricular interventions have accelerated, the implementation is a marathon which will require the attention teacher’s associations, educational authorities and government budgets. What is inspiring is the groundswell of support from communities and the energy of learners themselves to form into clubs and continue their own coding journey, even after courses have ended.
“2022 looks like the African coding milestone. From here on we’ll see a true mainstreaming of coding education in 10%-20% of schools across the continent. And from there it will only grow. We’ve definitely hit a critical mass in both public interest and government will to drive this forward”, says Jonathan Novotny, long-time CSed enthusiast and co-Founder of the CodeJIKA initiative.
Only time will tell what the future holds, but perhaps the tech-enabled African youth will be the game-changer for the continent and will build solutions to empower their communities. Viva Africa.
About Code For Change
Code for Change is an Ed-Tech non-profit organization that builds tools & curriculum to support real-world digital skills for teens in Africa and under-resourced communities, through their world-class coding program CodeJIKA.org.
CodeJIKA.org is a coding program that focuses on Frontend Web Dev training for high school students. Originally created for schools with offline PC labs, and now offer an efficient and easy-to-use free online platform. The simplicity of the program allows almost any school, teacher, and class to have fun, learn quickly, and get certified in these highly sought-after skills.
The Organization has:
- To date, directly trained 182,000 youth with its unique free offline coding curriculum and mobile platform.
- Upskilled trainers and teachers from 1,240 organizations throughout Africa with methodologies that enable rapid implementation.
- Reached 5.5 million people through awareness campaigns regarding coding.
- Finally, co-launched the world’s first mobile-friendly coding community platform (CodeJIKA.org) with tools for teachers and learners, which is still in beta, but has trained 40,000 learners in hands-on coding, since launch in Feb ’22.
For more information on partnering with the organization, visit www.codejika.org or contact the team members below:
Media Requests:[email protected]
Coding Events: [email protected]
Government Partnerships and Sponsorships:[email protected]
Contact Number: +27 10 226 9499
