Passionate Thing-ers: Electronics with a Passion
SwahiliBox has been an amazingly emotional experience for me, for a number of years. Ups and downs, and amazing challenges to solve. I can never state how I feel an attachment to the initiative. But needless to say, I am happy to be back to the scene, and I am happy to bootstrap my first amazing initative with the community since a while back.
Its a Saturday, just 2 weeks back, on the 30th of March 2019. We officially launch a program known as the IoT X-Gen Team, and the concept is really simple and extremely fun.
For a number of sprints — and by providing folks with a number of guided challenges they need to solve — which are in themselves fun activities, we shall be getting folks to passionately discover their skills and talents on IoT and electronics, of course with the facilitation of SwahiliBox. With me on this journey is Aly Salim and folks like Dennis Onkangi — an amazing alumni who has created his own electronics systems, as well as our alumni at Microsoft- Japeth Obala and our seasoned Electronics Engineer who is doing further studies in India: Neville Lusimba.
Together, we have a group of close to 15 folks who are passionate to learn electronics. They are distributed in 2 teams, each team solving the challenge individually. And we are off to an amazing start:
The teams have successfully solved their first challenge, and are well on their way to getting their second challenge solved. What makes this journey amazing is the fact that these folks had no previous exposure to electronics, and yet, they are coding embedded systems and getting a hang of IoT.
But what lies ahead?
- Our ambition is to get these folks to understand basic electronics and the Internet of Things.
- After which, we can then deep dive into the world of Embedded and IoT.
- After which, we can introduce them to basic fabrication and DIY.
- After which, folks can decide to major on the deep world of electronics.
The other important question that may be asked is — how can we support folks like these to go a step further? Well, various ways.
- Knowledge exchange. It can come in the form of — electronics, IoT, Embedded Linux, etc etc.
- Coming down here and sharing your know-how, if you are a seasoned expert.
- Contributing Electronics, IoT and Maker Equipment if you have any left somewhere to spare.
- Giving love to the SwahiliBox brand :)
It is in our hope that IoT and Electronics shall allow these young brilliant folks to become amazing innovators in Africa. And we look forward to expanding the SwahiliBox Labs program further to capacity build over and beyond.
We hope to always have regular updates on the successes of our programs and initiatives in this regard. Keep an eye open on this.
