She Code Africa Summer Code Camp 2020 Recap
Here at She Code Africa (SCA), we believe in the statement “Train a girl, Train a nation” and what better way to train them at an early stage other than our annual Summer Code Camp.
The She Code Africa Summer Code Camp (SCC) is a 4-week intensive bootcamp targeted at high school girls to educate them on tech and take them through intensive learning in different tracks in tech. This year’s edition was fully virtual due to the recent pandemic.
We opened up applications in July 2020 and received over 300 applications into the program with a range of participants from several states in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ghana, Gambia, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda across the ages 10–18 which also included girls from public secondary schools in District 1 of the Lagos State Government education district, an effect of our partnership with the Lagos State Government, Ministry of Education aimed at bringing more girls in public secondary schools across the state into tech.
After screening of applicants using the following criteria:
- Identify as a girl within the ages 10–18 and must reside in any of the African countries.
- Have access to a working laptop & internet connectivity for the duration of the program.
We accepted 134 girls from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya and the Gambia who joined the program and kicked off activities on the 5th of September.
The girls were put into different classes based on their age groups with a learning track simplified for their respective ages as seen below:
- Ruby Class — Ages 10 -12 — Scratch Development
- Sapphire Class — Ages 13–15 — HTML & CSS
- Emerald Class — Ages 16–18 — JavaScript
As is our culture, we had a set of guidelines curated for a seamless process throughout the program:
- Learning Curriculum — This contained well-detailed information used by our facilitators to aid learning activities for the full duration of the program. It was curated by our programs team and split into learning goals, weekly tasks, weekly assignments and resources for each learning milestone of the program.
- Persons of Contacts (POCs) — These are members of the SCA team who act as bridges between the facilitators, students and the SCA internal team. Their role was to aid the learning activities of the girls by ensuring a smooth transition between each learning session, use of Google Meet and Google Classroom — which was used because it created a seamless follow up process after learning sessions which included class chat forums and easy turn in of tasks and assignments by the students; and addressing issues/blockers being faced by the students.
- Fun Activities — Learning can also be fun as we believe. We curated a set of weekly fun activities for our students in order to foster more growth, knowledge and networking amongst the students which included:
Share your culture: Each girl was asked to introduce themselves, their culture and share key aspects of their culture like food, dance, greetings and so on. It was particularly interesting to learn about cultures from countries like Zimbabwe, Kenya.
Knowledge Session on Technology: It’s not just about learning a coding language, we took the girls on interactive sessions where we shared what technology is about, the different career fields, advantages and benefits.
Career Talk: We had a guest speaker - Aisha Bello — Cloud Solutions Engineer at Tech Data; who came on board to have a talk with the girls on starting out in technology at an early stage. She was able to run through a very insightful session and answered questions asked by some of the students.
This program will not be a success without:
- Our Facilitators who took time out of their busy schedules to teach our girls on the different learning tracks and work with them for the full 4-week duration.
- The Parents of our girls who gave us an opportunity to introduce a world of learning through technology to their daughters and also provided them with adequate resources like laptops and data access to aid their learning throughout the program.
- Our POCs who were there at every step to coordinate activities and address blockers/issues.
We rounded up activities on the 26th of September, 2020 with a total of 90 girls who were successfully trained on the different learning tracks as opposed to the initial 134 who started which was as a result of several reasons such as school resumptions, unavailability of resources or entrance examinations needed to be prepared for and taken.
As part of our learning activities, each student delivered a capstone project to reflect what they have been taught. Here are links to some of their final projects:
- https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/429705570 by Karabo Taisha
- https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/429371319/ by Paloma Olaiya
- https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/429700730 by Ama Ampaw
- https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/429700672 by Nneoma Amachi
- https://codepen.io/BugKiller/pen/jOqJxEJ by Abigail Chiviya
- https://codepen.io/Tiiwah/pen/MWyxGbW by Tiwanijesu Sulaiman
You can also watch our wrap up call here which included presentations of the projects.
Next Steps:
We would be following up with the students over the next couple of months through their parents/Guardians and aiding them with resources needed in order to aid further learning on their part.
Our Slack community remains a platform where our much older students can join and continue to engage with each other, get access to more resources plus career opportunities needed to grow.
We plan to partner with more organizations and state governments in order to sponsor and bring in more girls into the next year edition of the program. If you would love your organization to work with us on this, kindly send us a mail at partnerships@shecodeafrica.org
To financially support the impact we’re making on young girls through Our Summer Code Camp, we’re more than happy to receive your donations here.
