By Stephen Adeleye.
No fewer than 700 teachers in Kogi are being trained on ‘Coding’ in Information Communication Technology (ICT) to mark the ‘2019 Africa Code Week’.
Mrs Rosemary Osikoya, Kogi Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology (MOEST), disclosed this at a two-day ICT training for teachers at Nigeria Korean Friendship Institute (NKFI) in Lokoja, tagged: ”Africa Code Week”.
Mr Eric Aina, the ministry’s Permanent Secretary, who inaugurated the training on behalf of the commissioner, said the training was supported by SAP, UNICEF, Google, Coderina and other major stakeholders in collaboration with the Kogi State Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.
According to Aina, the two-day program is to expose our teachers to new information and communication technology with the main objective to build up teachers’ capacity in their official responsibilities.
This, he said would help in the course of teaching and learning of computer science in our various basic and secondary educational institutions across the State.
”The training is currently going on in four centres across Kogi which include: Lokoja centre at NKFI, Okene centre at Abdulaziz Attah Memorial College, Kabba centre at St Augustine College and Anyigba centre at Kogi State University.
”The program is open to all our computer science teachers, and it is so much enlarged that it has provision for 700 teachers across Kogi.
”So, the opportunity is there for all our computer science teachers to take part in the program,” Aina said.
One of the Master Trainers, Mr Akinniyi Obaide, Director, Coderina (coder in Africa), said the Africa Code Week’, started four years ago by the big giants in ICT industry, because there was a need to educate Africans on the area of coding technology.
According to Obaide, who is also the Representative of SAP, the ICT giants believed that it would be better off if we could start with the children. ”So, we now conceived the idea where at a certain time of the year from Oct. 14 to 25, experts go out to train children and teach them on coding.
”So, we are using coding program to teach them all over Africa. As we speak, the same thing is going on in over 30 countries across Africa.
”It is primarily meant to educate our children to develop interest and have a heart for technology.
”The idea is that through this ICT program, many family would be lifted out of poverty.
”This is just to teach the children to have the heart of solving problems, so that they have a problem solving opportunity, and get themselves and family out of poverty in the course of solving the problems,” Obaide said.
On his part, Mr Usman Sadiq, a Software Engineer at the MOEST, said the essence of the training was to train the teachers to enable them to train the children, saying the program was majorly designed for children.
”We will train the teachers and they will go back and train the pupils so that we can actually catch up with rest of the world in technology,” Sadiq said.
One of the trainees, Mr Taiwo Igunnugbemi from Scintillate International Model School, said the training was a landmark because it was very interesting, saying he has learning new things.
”Aside being on the field, we can make our own ends meet out of the program so that we will not be limited to monthly salary alone but do something extra,” he said.
