STEM - Introduction

I am Phyllis Nassuna Ntananga, a 22 old final year student of the Bachelor of Information Technology program at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Mbarara. I have a keen interest in Computer Software Programming as well as an equally strong enthusiasm for Engineering and Robotics. For the bigger part of my time at this university, I have participated in several local and global computer technology-themed innovation challenges and competitions. I have as well as volunteered in as many ICT focused initiatives
More recently, I took part as a trainer in the Africa Code Week, a program organized by Google that was aimed at introducing primary school children to computer programming using a software called Scratch by volunteering students and ICT professionals. Personally, I discovered that this was a great experience for the school children at the two the schools we went to. These children showed so much excitement when we introduced the program that at the end of each 1-2 hour sessions, some of them would ask if they could get Scratch on their parents’ computers to continue developing these programs. Others asked if they would still access the software after we had left. I remember one particular pupil asking me if she can call me over the holidays to and go teach her from her home. This touched me so deeply and I thought of what would happen to all this inspiration, the excitement of discovering and learning more if these children never saw us again or if they didn’t get anyone to teach or take them through this program again.
In the same period, I got a chance to be one of the trainers at the Gulu Robotics Camp, organized by Oysters and Pearls Uganda to educate children in primary and secondary schools from different parts of Uganda about Computer Technology and Robotics in particular. With the children at the camp also asking me the same questions as the ones I had gone to teach in the first two schools, I decided to come up with an own program of teaching computer programming to school children in at least five schools, with colleagues that I had worked with in the very first events.
We volunteer to teach computer programming to school children in classes Primary Three to Primary Seven, using a platform called Scratch which is easy for the children to learn and has a lot of abilities that the learners can use to do several programs. We also plan to teach girl students in secondary schools so as to counter the gender imbalance in technology and encourage more female participation in STEM.
Scratch as a platform has very many features good for the school going children such as; maths, controls and animations among others that they will use to help improve their understanding of some concepts in class. We also have hardware with Scratch that we shall introduce the children. This hardware has features like light, sound, value variance and resistors that are fundamental in the field of Electronics.
We plan to make this program bigger and more impactful in our drive to change the nation through these young but brilliant minds by introducing them to Technology and Engineering. For the start, we have few equipment which we shall use to teach with. We hope to get voluntary support from the schools and other organizations to see that we get more equipment to use as the number of the students increases.

Comments

  1. The Marketing Insight30 June 2020 at 05:34

    You are such a great inspiration to the young stars embarrassing Tech Phyllis! In this bold new digital world tech is a new shift that even the least in our communities are embracing and your sacrifice to our little Stars is a great contribution to the nation and the world at large. Kudos

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ideation Camp At MUST

Image
Outbox brings the Intel Ideation Camp to the West; an exciting way to begin the weekend with guidance through innovation and Entrepreneurship by trainers from Outbox to the youth in ICS Mbarara University of Science and Technology.  The Intel Ideation Camp is a 2 days long workshop in which participants go through the learning process to ideate, innovate and imagine solutions to identified problems.   It started with a speech from the institute director, aimed at guiding the youth through coming up with ideas that solve a problem that is faced by the many Ugandans, with the excitement and vigor  among the students to find out what happens, students were taken through a step by step journey. Students identified themselves as hackers, hustlers or artists to form teams. Choosing a particular sector from agriculture, health and education, they listed the different problems selecting one most pressing problem among the many with a broader understanding of the user that is most affec
Read more

Kids into developing Technologies

Image
What was your experience during school and while growing up? Well, mine was not so different from the many Ugandans’ of my times and before. The school curriculum included Mathematics, English, and Social Studies and Science including other activities like Physical Exercises and outside school, I would learn how to do house chores.  All I had to think about was the four subjects, who to play with and when to play. Problems were for the grown-ups and they were the ones to solve them. Then, none or just one person in the whole society owned a mobile phone which was mostly likely to be a company phone as Technology was just in its initial stages of development. Computers were owned by very big companies if not only the government ministries. Communication was through letters if not physical. And data in schools, businesses, hospitals, police stations and banks was recorded on and stored in hard copy,  usually a huge stack of papers in enormous box files. If I was to ask, what
Read more

Journey to Innovation

Image
When I reported to university for my first year, I knew what program I was going to do and I always answered the question “...which program are you planning on doing?” quite well. If by any chance anyone had asked me about the kinds of activities or skills my program contained, that would have been the end of me had it been an admission question. Strangely, in my Secondary Level I had hated computers and anything was concerned with them. Yet, here I was, going to do a Computer Science program. The first week involved Fresher Orientation and was really hard for me, having to  be in the computer lab and failing to even power on a computer. Soon, all that changed. This was when I first heard of the Google Student Ambassador program at the MUST. Out of curiosity, I often wondered what it takes to be a Google Student Ambassador and this is what opened my eyes, my capabilities and most importantly, my love for technology. I really wanted to know what it would take me to become an ambas
Read more