When I think of Nigeria I think of community. We are part of a community and we contribute to that community. So let me tell you a story about community.
We were having problems with our venue. Then in stepped Pastor John. He was one of a few local dignitaries we invited to see the teaching at the start of the course. He was so impressed that upon hearing we were having venue problems he told us 4 words: “I’ll sort it out” (5 words if you want to be pedantic).
I’m pretty certain he brought down the fear of God! A threat my mum used on us as kids. Since then, we’ve not had any issues with the venue. And even more amazingly the local church has taken on the venue cost freeing up some of our precious resources.
I think that’s the true meaning of community. We support others, but we are (more importantly) supported by some pretty amazing people. And the venue is amazing: there has been constant electricity and a great modern space to teach and learn in. We are grateful to be in such a high quality venue.
The first week is all about wordpress (https://wordpress.org/about/). A great tool for building websites that currently powers 42% of all sites across the web.
Our students dove head first into learning about wordpress which culminated in a challenge to build an e-library website. Split into teams of 3 each team had only 3 hours to create a website from scratch. You can check out the results here:
We are super excited to announce the start of our first bootcamp. We have an exciting 10 week course planned for our students including a hackathon 🤫
The training in Nigeria will be conducted by Otupko Tech Academy (https://www.otukpotech.org/). Our partner organisation we’ve set up to deliver the training in Nigeria. And over the last few weeks our volunteers have been providing training to Daniel who will be teaching the course.
From Daniel: “We have a great course content and some pretty fun activities lined up as part of the course. I’m certain the students will enjoy the course, and more importantly learn a very necessary and important skillset [coding].”
“Congratulations and thank you all for all your hard work” and with that a whirlwind week coding ended for our students, and for us: the fourth, and last of our ‘beta’ week long courses.
It may have been the last in our ‘beta’ of 4 courses to test our strategy, but this was a course of firsts:
our first all-female group
the first time we taught the course on phones. You heard that correctly, all the students on this course were writing code on their phones. And thank God as it was also:
the first time we didn’t have electricity (a surprisingly common occurrence in Nigeria).
We were amazed at the hard work that our students have put in over the four courses and also the hard work that has been put in by Daniel from the Otukpo Tech Academy who’s been teaching the courses in Otukpo
So when we say “Congratulations and thank you all for all your hard work” we mean it from the depths of our hearts.
We’ve just competed our first week of teaching coding in Nigeria and we’re super excited to share it with you.
Our free course (including a healthy lunch) taught 9 young adults in Otupko, Nigeria how to code. This culminating in an exciting final day project where our students put into practice all the skills they’d learnt.
The challenge: create a website from scratch and have it live on the internet before the 2pm deadline. It was race against the clock but all the teams successful completed the challenge and presented their websites.
We got some amazing feedback from our students including this quote: “I wish I can practice it [the coding] overnight”.
We’re lauching our first course this week. We’re super excited to be teaching 10 students web development skills over the course of a week.
Over the course of the week they will learn basic html, js and css skills. And at the end of the week they’ll spend a day, hackathon style, going from an idea to a fully working website that they’ll demo.
