Building Kids Into Whizkids

If you are a techie like me you must have heard about one of these: computer science for high school, hour of code. If you are not a techie you must have heard catch them young or the leaders of tomorrow. I must have complained a lot about NYSC, I had to stop, come to think of it,the NYSC scheme puts me in a position to impact on my host community however big or small. It puts me in a position to build the next set of leaders. With obvious bias, I want the kids in my host community to be next technology leaders of their generations and digital armed forces of Nigeria. This prompted me to start an ICT club in my school.

I can not but mention that the hour of code promotional videos especially the one from Mark Zuckerberg keeps motivating me to do more with raising the next generation of ICT leaders. 

Let me digress a little bit I was not lucky to start programming at 13 like Bill gate but I once did Logo programming maybe at 15 can’t remember exactly and I felt good about it. However, today is not for inviting you to a pity party of how I started coding late. I am inviting you rather to a challenge. I challenge you to become a nation builder however small or big. Build someone today with your intellect and resources and stop complaining of infrastructural/system collapse in the nation.
Back to the business, the vision for the club was simple: to build next generation of technology leaders. We call ourselves “Whizkids”. And our mission was to empower ourselves with contemporary tools to deliver the future. How do we get this done? We will focus on web, mobile and robotics technology. 
There are a lot of options here, it was hard getting to choose which technology to actually start with. Scratch, snap, JavaScript, Python, html all staring at me. I decided to start off with html. Whatever you believe in someone agrees with you on the Internet. Someone recently said internet is going to be a place where people echo your ideas. Technologies like Facebook like, Twitter favorite and retweet are obvious examples. I stumbled on html for babies it was helpful in coming up with a curriculum. 

Are the kids excited? Yeah they are super excited they are going to be building a website. How will you feel if at 13, if someone told you, you will be taught how to build a rocket or robot in 2 months. I will be super excited. My closest-to-techy-experience was turning my dad transistor radio to my physics experiment apparatus. It was good experience for me but it was attracted punishment from my dad. 

The kids are doing well with learning that HTML code is like two slices of bread with butter. The first slice of bread is like the opening tag, the butter is the content in the middle and the closing tag is like the second slice of bread. My kids have successfully built a webpage containing their school anthem and they are excited.

Everyone who reads this I challenge you to hold an #hourofcode event for kids in your schools, churches or mosques. You can also tweet at me at @tosinamuda