03/10/2023
Tangible Africa features prominently in th Sunday Times this morning, as a result of Engagement Manager Jackson Tshabalala speaking at the AWS Summit in Sandton on Tuesday.
Igniting a Spark
AWS has a goal of training 29-million people in information and communications technology skills over the next five years, and is halfway to reaching the target.
Among others, it has partnered with the Gqeberha-based Leva Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to bridge the digital divide, in a project initially aimed at teaching coding to 10,000 schoolchildren.
Leva’s engagement manager Jackson Tshabalala said the project was not just teaching coding, it was “igniting a spark that will set an entire generation on fire with digital progress”.
“AWS has allowed us to expand dramatically, reaching over 60,000 learners and training about 30,000 teachers. We’ve been able to explore and expand in Africa and in Europe. Recently we did a training session with AWS and communities in Dublin, where master trainers were trained all the way from Germany to the UK.”
Originally a Nelson Mandela University programme, with Leva as implementation partner, the idea was to teach digital skills and coding without the use of computers or the internet in rural and township schools. It has been a revelation to both Leva and AWS that its methods are globally relevant.
“We found the tools that we’ve been using do more than teach coding without computers. We teach coding skills that allow for problem solving. In other words, computational skills such as decomposition, pattern recognition, algorithm design, as well as abstraction, are relevant in any kind of setting.”
The lightbulb moment, he said, was when Leva wanted to introduce offline coding to a school that said it already had computers and internet access, but still wanted the skills. “We asked, what are we actually teaching them? Are we just teaching coding? And they said, ‘No, you teach computational thinking.’ When we did it in Europe it worked really well, and we realised that we have a global solution that has been birthed from Africa.”
